32. Grasshoppers are the informal state mascot; Nebraska terms itself the "Bugeater State." Long before the Cornhuskers name, the University of Nebraska football team called itself the "Bugeaters" in 1892 in honor of its flying guests. Nebraska football fans still informally call themselves Bugeaters. Grasshoppers love drought conditions and contribute to soil erosion by devouring every living plant down to the black earth. From 19341938 the estimated national cost of grasshopper destruction was $315.8 million (about $4.7 billion in 2007 dollars). The region encompassing Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Iowa was the epicenter of grasshopper infestation. See Almanac for Nebraskans 1939; also Ivan Ray Tannehill, Drought: Its Causes and Effects. Princeton: University Press, 1947.

33. "Farmers Harvest Hoppers for Fish Bait," Omaha World-Herald, August 1, 1931.

34. As asserted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inaugural address (March 4, 1933)-he was speaking, however, of economic paralysis.

35. Lacking electronic security and thoughtful cash controls, banks were more vulnerable to robbery in those days, and an epidemic of bank robberies took place in the 1930s.

36. Several Buffetts, including Howard and Bertie, contracted polio. Another epidemic took place in the mid-1940s. People born after the vaccine became available in the 1950s and '60s may find the chronic anxiety this disease engendered difficult to comprehend, but it was very real at the time.

37. In 1912, twenty-five people were injured when a howling wind derailed a train near North Loup, Nebraska, according to the Almanac for Nebraskans 1939.

38. Ted Keitch letter to Warren Buffett, May 29, 2003. Keitch's father worked at the Buffett store.

39. Interview with Doris Buffett.

40. Howard wanted his children to attend Dundee's Benson High School instead of Central, where he had suffered from snobbery.

41. Marion Barber Stahl was a partner in his own firm, Stahl and Updike, and had become counsel to the New York Daily News, among other clients. He and his wife, Dorothy, lived on Park Avenue and had no children. Obituary of Marion Stahl, New York Times, November 11, 1936.

42. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

43. Interviews with Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett, Doris Buffett.

44. Interview with Doris Buffett.

45. September 9, 1935, at the Columbian School.

46. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek as well as Warren Buffett.

Chapter 7.

1. Adults interviewed by the author who attended Rosehill as children recall it as idyllic, yet the year before Warren started first grade, Rosehill parents pleaded for relief from overcrowded rooms and a "mud hole" playground. They were told not to expect help "until the sheriff collects back taxes." "School Plea Proves Vain," Omaha World-Herald, January 22, 1935.

2. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

3. Walt Loomis, the teacher of the boxing lesson, was a big kid, about Doris's age.

4. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

5. Stella's doctors referred to her as schizophrenic, while noting she suffered annually from predictable periods of agitation and confusion, and indicated that her personality did not deteriorate as expected in schizophrenia. Based on family history and Bernice's statement that other older relatives in addition to Stella's mother, Susan Barber, were "maniacal" and mentally unstable, bipolar disorder may be suspected as the real condition. This disease was barely understood, to say the least, in the 1930s and '40s.

6. From an entry in Leila's "day book."

7. In an interview, one of his classmates, Joan Fugate Martin, recalled Warren showing up on his rounds periodically to "shoot the breeze" in her driveway.

8. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

9. Interviews with Stu Erickson, Warren Buffett.

10. According to his Rosehill transcript, Warren was promoted to 4B in 1939.

11. Interview with Stu Erickson.

12. "My appendectomy was the high point of my social life," Buffett says.

13. "I wish one of those nuns had gone bad," he says today.

14. Rosco McGowen, "Dodgers Battle Cubs to 19-Inning Tie," New York Times, May 18, 1939. (Warren and Ernest did not stay for the entire game.) 15. Ely Culbertson, Contract Bridge Complete: The New Gold Book of Bidding and Play. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., 1936.

16. This explanation of bridge was provided by Bob Hamman, eleven-time world champion and #1-ranked bridge player in the world between 1985 and 2004. Hamman appears at the Berkshire shareholders' meeting.

Chapter 8.

1. Warren bought the gum for three cents a pack from his grandfather.

2. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek.

3. Two presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, had previously sought election to a third term. Both were defeated.

4. The Trans-Lux Corporation placed the first ticker-tape projection system at the New York Stock Exchange in 1923. The system worked something like a fax machine. Trans-Lux knew a good thing when it saw one: The company's own stock was listed on the American Stock Exchange in 1925, and Trans-Lux remains the oldest listed company on the Amex today.

5. Frank Buffett had reconciled with Ernest on Henrietta's death in 1921 and ran the other Buffett store. John Barber was a real estate agent.

6. Pyramid schemes are frauds that promise investors impossible returns, using cash from later investors to pay off earlier investors and create the appearance of success. To keep going, the scheme has to grow like a pyramid, but their geometrically compounding structure guarantees eventual failure and discovery.

7. Alden Whitman, "Sidney J. Weinberg Dies at 77; 'Mr. Wall Street' of Finance," New York Times, July 24, 1969; Lisa Endlich, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success. New York: Knopf, 1999.

8. That Weinberg cared about his opinion mattered more than the opinion itself; Buffett has no recollection of which stock he recommended to Weinberg.

9. Buffett later said, in an interview, that these were the words that ran through his head-"that's where the money is"-although at the time he was not familiar with the famous quote attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton.

10. Almost a decade later, he would lower the age to 30 while talking to his sister Bertie, who was 14 or 15 at the time. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

11. Buffett believes he overheard his father talking about the stock, which traded on the "Curb Exchange," where brokers gathered in the street (later organized into the American Stock Exchange).

12. From the records of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.

Chapter 9.

1. "All these handouts in Europe are being used by the politicians to retain and expand their own power." "U.S. Moving to Socialism," citing Howard Buffett, Omaha World-Herald, September 30, 1948.

2. Roosevelt said this in Boston on October 30, 1940, while campaigning for his third term, fourteen months before Pearl Harbor.

3. Leila Buffett letter to Clyde and Edna Buffett, undated but approximately 1964.

4. United States Department of Agriculture and Nebraska Department of Agriculture, Nebraska Agricultural Statistics (preliminary report) 1930. Lincoln, Government Printing Office, 1930, p. 3.

5. Buffett's impression of 1940s South Omaha was vivid: "If you walked around down there in those days, believe me, it was not conducive to eating hot dogs."

6. John R. Commons, "Labor Conditions in Meat Packing and Recent Strike," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1904; Roger Horowitz, "'Where Men Will Not Work': Gender, Power, Space and the Sexual Division of Labor in America's Meatpacking Industry, 18901990," Technology and Culture, 1997; Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1997; Harry B. Otis, with Donald H. Erickson, E. Pluribus Omaha: Immigrants All. Omaha: Lamplighter Press (Douglas County Historical Society), 2000. Horowitz, commenting specifically on Omaha, points out that slaughterhouses in 1930 were still organized much the same way as portrayed in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle.

7. In 2005, the GAO cited "respiratory irritation or even asphyxiation from exposure to chemicals, pathogens, and gases" as a current occupational risk for industry workers in GAO 05-95 Health and Safety of Meat and Poultry Workers. See also Nebraska Meatpacking Industry Workers Bill of Rights (2000), a "voluntary instrument" whose "reach has been modest," according to Joe Santos of the state labor department, as cited by Human Rights Watch in its report Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers' Rights in the U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry, December 2004.

8. This description of Washington in wartime owes much to David Brinkley's Washington Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).

9. With so many men off to war, 15% of the city's buses and trolleys sat idle. The Capital Transit company refused to hire blacks as conductors and motormen after it hired one black conductor in 1943 and the white conductors walked off the job. (Over the course of 1944 and 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, reported to the Attorney General that "If the company employs Negroes as operators there will be an immediate 'wildcat' strike...and the inevitable result would be the complete paralysis of the transportation system in the District of Columbia." (Office memorandums re: racial conditions in Washington, D.C., September 5, 1944, and December 9, 1944, from Georgia State Special Collections.) 10. Howard University students used "stool-sitting" on two occasions: In April 1943, at Little Palace cafeteria, until the proprietor changed his policy, and a year later, with fifty-six students at Thompson's Restaurant, where some whites joined the cause, a crowd gathered, and the police got Thompson's to serve everyone, temporarily. (Flora Bryant Brown, "NAACP Sponsored Sit-Ins by Howard University Students in Washington, D.C., 19431944," The Journal of Negro History, 85.4, Fall 2000).

11. Dr. Frank Reichel headed American Viscose.

12. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett.

13. Buffett is probably embellishing a little here with hindsight.

14. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

15. Gladys, formerly known as Gussie, changed her name to Mary sometime during this period. Warren vainly pursued a romance with her daughter Carolyn, who later married Buffett's friend Walter Scott.

16. Warren claims it was Byron's idea. Byron claims it was Warren's idea. Stu says he can't remember.

17. Joan Fugate Martin, who remembers the date, in an interview corroborated the story. She called the boys perfect gentlemen, but had nothing to add about their self-confessed awkwardness.

18. Interviews with Stu Erickson and Byron Swanson, who supplied various details of the story.

19. The phone number is from a letter from Mrs. Anna Mae Junno, whose grandfather used to work as a meat cutter.

20. The lowly stock boy was Charlie Munger.

21. Interview with Katie Buffett.

22. Ibid. Leila had a striver's fascination with social hierarchies and upward mobility.

23. "You might argue that it was working in my grandfather's grocery store that fostered a lot of desire for independence in me," Buffett says.

24. This letter, which was at one time one of Buffett's treasured heirlooms, resided in his desk drawer for many years, written on a piece of yellow paper. He can no longer locate it. Through a trade association, Ernest lobbied against chain stores and worked for legislation that would levy special taxes on them-in vain.

25. Interview with Doris Buffett.

26. Warren Buffett letter to Meg Greenfield, June 19, 1984.

27. Sadly, no one in the family can locate a copy of this manuscript today.

28. Spring Valley marketing brochure. The place had its own coat of arms.

29. "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service." Before the WAVES, the Navy accepted women only as nurses.

30. Alice Deal Junior High School was named after the first junior high principal in Washington, D.C.

31. Buffett is reasonably sure Ms. Allwine was his English teacher and that "she had good reason" for her low opinion of him. "I deserved it," he says.

32. Interview with Casper Heindel.

33. "I'm not sure I paid tax on that either," Warren adds.

34. In her memoir, Leila wrote that Warren would not let her touch the money.

35. Roger Bell, who confirms the story in an interview, was saving war-bond stamps until he had enough to buy an actual bond, and cashed them in to fund the trip. "I told my mother we were going, but she didn't believe me," he says.

36. Interview with Roger Bell.

37. From Buffett's 1944 report cards.

38. Based on comments in his report cards.

39. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.

40. Queen Wilhelmina owned stock in the Dutch holding company that had bought The Westchester.

41. He collected the bus passes from various routes. "They were colorful. I collected anything." Asked if anyone else in his family ever collected anything: "No. They were more popular."

42. Customers also discarded old magazines in the stairwells, and Warren would pick them up.

43. While Warren recalls the story, it was Lou Battistone who remembered its fascinating details.

44. Interview with Lou Battistone.

Chapter 10.