Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly. Let the other person save face.

I am talking about a new way of life, Carnegie said. I am talking about a new way of life.

Warren's heart lifted. He thought he had found the truth. This was a system. He felt so disadvantaged socially that he needed a system to sell himself to people, a system he could learn once and use without having to respond in a new way to each changing situation.

But it took numbers to prove that it actually worked. He decided to do a statistical analysis of what happened if he did follow Dale Carnegie's rules, and what happened if he didn't. He tried giving attention and appreciation, and he tried doing nothing or being disagreeable. People around him did not know he was performing experiments on them in the silence of his own head, but he watched how they responded. He kept track of his results. Filled with a rising joy, he saw what the numbers proved: The rules worked.

Now he had a system. He had a set of rules.

But it did you no good to read about the rules. You had to live them. I am talking about a new way of life, said Carnegie.

Warren began to practice. He started at a very elementary level. Some of it came naturally to him, but he found that this system could not be applied in an automatic and easy manner. "Don't criticize" sounded simple, but there were ways to criticize without even realizing it. It was hard not to show off, not to display annoyance and impatience. And admitting you were wrong was easy sometimes and very difficult at other times. Giving people attention and sincere appreciation and admiration was one of the hardest. Someone sunk in misery much of the time, as Warren was, found it hard to focus on others, not himself.

Nevertheless, he gradually worked out for himself that the dark years of junior high were living proof that ignoring Dale Carnegie's rules didn't work. As he started to gain his footing in high school, he continued to practice the rules in encounters with others.

Unlike most people who read Carnegie's book and thought, gee, that makes sense, then set the book aside and forgot about it, Warren worked at this project with unusual concentration; he kept coming back to these ideas and using them. Even when he failed and forgot and went for long stretches without applying himself to the system, he returned and resumed practicing in the end. By high school, he had accumulated a few more friends, joined the Woodrow Wilson golf team, and managed to make himself inoffensive if not popular. Dale Carnegie had honed his natural wit; above all, it enhanced his persuasiveness, his flair for salesmanship.

He seemed intense, yet with an impish side; even-tempered and congenial, yet somehow solitary. Certainly his passion for making money-which occupied most of his spare time-made him unique at Woodrow Wilson.

No one else in high school was a businessman. Just from pitching newspapers a couple of hours a day, he was earning $175 a month, more money than his teachers. In 1946, a grown man felt well paid if he made $3,000 a year for full-time work.11 Warren kept his money in a chifforobe at home, which no one but he was allowed to touch. "I was in his house one day," says Lou Battistone, "and he opened up a drawer and said, 'This is what I've been saving.' And he had seven hundred dollars in small bills. That's a big stack, let me tell you."12 He had started several new businesses. Buffett's Golf Balls peddled refurbished golf balls for six bucks a dozen.13 These he ordered from a fellow in Chicago named Witek, whom Warren couldn't resist nicknaming "Half-Witek." "They were classy balls, really good golf balls too, Titleist and Spalding Dots and Maxflis, which I bought for three and a half bucks a dozen. They looked brand-new. He probably got them the way we first tried to get them, out of water traps, only he was better." Nobody at school knew about Half-Witek. Even his family didn't seem to realize that he bought the used golf balls that he and his friend Don Danly were selling. Fellow members of the Wilson golf team thought he fished them out of water traps.14 Buffett's Approval Service sold sets of collectible stamps to collectors out of state. Buffett's Showroom Shine was a car-buffing business that he and Battistone ran out of Lou's father's used-car lot, until they abandoned this because it involved manual labor and turned out to be too damn much work.15 Then one day when Warren was seventeen and a senior, he raced to tell Don Danly about a new idea. It had the same exponential quality to it as the weighing machines from One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000-where one machine could pay for another and another. "I bought this old pinball machine for twenty-five bucks," he said, "and we can have a partnership. Your part of the deal is to fix it up.16 And, lookit, we'll tell Frank Erico, the barber, 'We represent Wilson's Coin-Operated Machine Company, and we have a proposition from Mr. Wilson. It's at no risk to you. Let's put this nickel machine in the back, Mr. Erico, and your customers can play while they wait. And we'll split the money.'"17 Danly was game. Although no one had ever put pinball machines in barbershops before, they presented their proposition to Mr. Erico, who bit. The boys took the legs off the pinball machine, put it in Don's father's car, and hauled it over to Mr. Erico's barbershop, where they installed it. Sure enough, the very first evening, when Warren and Don came back to check, "Gee zip!" Warren said-four bucks' worth of nickels had found their way into the machine. Mr. Erico was delighted, and the pinball machine stayed.18 After a week, Warren emptied the machine and scooped the nickels into two piles. "Mr. Erico," he said, "let's not bother going one for you, one for me. Just pick the pile you want."19 It was like the old-fashioned way of dividing cake: one child cuts, the other child chooses. After Mr. Erico swept one pile over toward his side of the table, Warren counted out the other and found $25 in his pile. That was enough to buy another pinball machine. Pretty soon, seven or eight of "Mr. Wilson's" pinball machines were sitting in barbershops around town. Warren had discovered the miracle of capital: money that works for its owner, as if it had a job of its own.

"You had to get along with the barbers. That was crucial. I mean, these guys could all go buy these machines for twenty-five bucks themselves. So we would always convince them that it took someone with a four-hundred IQ to repair pinball machines.

"Now, there were some pretty unsavory characters in the pinball business, and they all hung out at a place called Silent Sales. That was our hunting ground. Silent Sales was in the 900 block of D Street, right near the Gayety burlesque house on the seedy side of downtown. These characters at Silent Sales were amused by us, sort of. Danly and I would go down there, and we'd look at these machines and buy whatever we could for twenty-five bucks. New machines cost about three hundred dollars. I used to subscribe to Billboard magazine in those days to keep track of what was going on in pinball machines.

"The guys at Silent Sales taught us some things. There were some illegal slot machines around. And they showed us how to pour beer into them to make a fifty-cent piece get stuck in the mechanism, and you could just keep pulling the handle until it paid. They showed us how to disable the electric cutoff for the coin-operated soda machines at the movie theaters so if you stuck a nickel in, then immediately pulled the plug, you could empty the whole machine.

"These guys would explain all this stuff to us and we'd just eat it up.

"My dad probably suspected the kind of characters we were hanging out with. But he always felt I'd turn out okay."

Warren and Don were already making good money with single pinball machines in barbershops, but then they found a gold mine. "Our home run of all time was down near Griffith Stadium, which is the old baseball park." In the middle of Washington's worst slums, they found "a seven-chair black barbershop. There were a lot of dudes down there. After we put a pinball machine in, we would come back to collect, and these guys had drilled holes in the bottom of the machine and rigged the tilt mechanism. It was a real contest of wills. But that was our mother lode, our best location by far. The guys who played at these barbershops were constantly imploring us to adjust the tilt mechanism so you could shove the machine harder without making it tilt.

"Listen, we were not judgmental about our customers." If anything, they were probably trying to pick up more ideas like the scams the guys at Silent Sales had taught them, and those they were inventing on their own. "One time we were down in Danly's basement playing with my coin collection. To make collecting on the paper route more interesting, I used to collect different kinds of coins. So I had these Whitman coin boards with slots for the coins. I said to Don, 'It looks to me like we could take these coin boards and use them as molds for casting slugs.'

"Danly was the brains of the operation. And so, sure enough, he learned how to pour these molds for casting slugs, and I supplied the coin boards. We would try to use the slugs for vending machines for soda pop and things like that. Our basic formula was to have our income in currency and our outgo in slugs.

"One time, Danly's father came down in the basement and said, 'What are you boys doing?'

"We were pouring metal into these things. And it was, 'We're doing this experiment for school, Dad.' We were always doing experiments for school."

At school, however, Warren mostly liked to talk about his businesses-not his scams-and by the spring semester, near the end of high school, his raconteuring had turned him and Don into a minor legend around Woodrow Wilson.

"Everybody knew we had the pinball-machine business, and everybody kind of knew we were raking it in. We probably exaggerated too when we told them. And so people wanted in on it. It was like stocks."

One of them was a boy named Bob Kerlin-an intense kid who played on the golf team with Warren.20 He and Don weren't open to letting anyone in on their pinball business, but they did have a plan for using Kerlin for their newest venture. "We had given up stealing the golf balls from Sears, but we got this idea that we were going to retrieve lost golf balls from the lakes on golf courses around Washington. And now we saw a position for Kerlin, because neither one of us wanted to retrieve the golf balls."

They created an elaborate scenario for how Kerlin would do this. It bordered on an evil prank, but school was out in a couple of months, so what the hell.

"We went down again to Ninth and D, where the army surplus store was located, right by Silent Sales, and bought a gas mask. And then we got this garden hose and we hooked them up and tested this thing in a bathtub by putting our faces in three inches of water."

Doing what he called his Tom Sawyer routine, Warren said to Kerlin: "'This is your chance. We're going to deal you in.' We told him that we would go out at four in the morning to some golf course in Virginia, and that he would wear the gas mask in the lake and retrieve the balls, and we'd split the money three ways.

"Kerlin said, 'How do I stay down on the bottom?' I said, 'Oh, I've got that all worked out. What we will do is, you'll strip, and you'll be nude, but you'll wear my Washington Post newspaper bag, and we'll put barbell plates in the newspaper bag so that you'll stay on the bottom.'

"So we went out to this golf course, and all the way Kerlin was expressing some doubt. And Danly and I said, 'Have we ever failed? I mean, you're looking at a couple of guys...if you want to quit now, okay, but, you know, you're not in any future deals.'

"So we got out there at the crack of dawn. Kerlin was stripped, and we were dressed warmly. He was totally nude with a Washington Post newspaper bag on and all these barbell plates, and he started wading into the lake. Of course, he didn't know if he was stepping on snakes or golf balls or whatever. And then he got down and when he tugged on the rope, we pulled him back up. He said, 'I can't see anything.' We said, 'Don't worry about seeing anything, just grope around.' And he started to go back down.

"But before his head went under, this truck came over the rise, carrying the guy that's going to fill up sand traps in the morning. He saw us and drove up, saying, 'What are you kids doing?' Danly and I were thinking fast. 'We're conducting an experiment for our high school physics class, sir.' Kerlin was nodding the whole time. So we had to get him out of the pond. The whole thing blew up on us."21 Whatever happened to poor Kerlin, and however nude he actually was, a watered-down version of this story got around. It would be the last great Tom Sawyering of Warren's high school career.

By now, however, he had made a small fortune: a glistening $5,000 heap, sticky with the newsprint from throwing more than five hundred thousand newspapers. Newsprint snowflakes made up more than half his snowball. Rich as he was, however, Warren meant to keep that snowball rolling.*8

13.

The Rules of the Racetrack Omaha and Washington, D.C. * 1940s Warren's Dale Carnegie tests of behavior were handicapping: a mathematical experiment on human nature. The data he collected gave him the odds that Carnegie was right.

This way of thinking was an extension of his childhood hobby of calculating the odds on the life expectancies of hymn composers. But his interest in longevity was no mere abstraction. Ernest Buffett, to whom Warren was extremely attached, had died in September 1946 at age sixty-nine, while the family was in Omaha campaigning for Howard's third term. Warren was sixteen. Of his four grandparents, only Stella, age seventy-three, remained alive, confined in the Norfolk State Hospital. Long before Ernest's death, Warren had been preoccupied with his own lifespan; these latest family events did nothing to ease his mind about either longevity or insanity. Warren's passion for handicapping, however, extended to many other subjects, and in an embryonic form had started much earlier-well before he even knew the meaning of the term-back when he was a little kid with marbles and license plates and bottle caps and a fingerprint kit for nuns.

The art of handicapping is based on information. The key was having more information than the other guy-then analyzing it right and using it rationally. Warren had first put this into practical use as a child down at the Ak-Sar-Ben racetrack, when his friend Bob Russell's mother introduced the boys to the world of pari-mutuel betting.

Warren and Russ were too young to wager, but they quickly figured out how to make a buck. Amid the cigarette butts, beer slops, old programs, and hot-dog remnants in the grime and sawdust of the Ak-Sar-Ben floorboards were thousands of discarded tickets, peeping out like mushrooms on the forest floor. The boys turned themselves into truffle hounds.

"They call that 'stooping.' At the start of the racing season you get all these people who'd never seen a race except in the movies. And they'd think that if your horse came in second or third, you didn't get paid, because all the emphasis is on the winner, so they'd throw away place and show tickets. The other time you would hit it big was when there was a disputed race. That little light would go on that said 'contested' or 'protest.' By that time, some people had thrown away their tickets. Meanwhile, we were just gobbling them up. We wouldn't even look at them when we were working. At night we'd go through them. It was awful; people would spit on the floor. But we had great fun. If I found any winning tickets, my aunt Alice, who didn't care anything at all about races, would cash them in for us, because they wouldn't cash them for kids."

Warren wanted to go to the races all the time. When Mrs. Russell wasn't taking him, "my dad would never go to the races," says Buffett. "He did not believe in the races." Instead, his parents let his great-uncle Frank, the oddball of the family, take him. Frank had long ago reconciled with Ernest and had eventually married a woman whom the family referred to as "the gold-digger."1 He had no particular interest in the horses, but he took Warren to Ak-Sar-Ben because his great-nephew wanted to go.

At Ak-Sar-Ben, Warren had learned something about how to read the tip sheet, and it opened up a whole new world. Handicapping horses combined two things he was very, very good at: collecting information and math. It was not unlike counting cards at blackjack, except that the winning hand had four legs and ran around a track. Soon, he and Russ knew enough to put out their own tip sheet, the cannily named Stable-Boy Selections.

"We got away with it for a while. They weren't the hottest sellers in the world. I mean, a couple of little kids selling this thing we typed up in my basement on an old Royal typewriter. The limiting factor was carbons in those days. You could probably only get in five or so carbons. But I got on the Royal and Bob Russell and I doped out the horses and then we typed up this thing.

"We were in the track, yelling, 'Get your Stable-Boy Selections!' But the Blue Sheet was the number-one tip sheet, and the racetrack was getting a commission on it. The Blue Sheet sold for a little more. At twenty-five cents, we were a cut-rate product. They shut down the Stable-Boy Selections fast because they were getting a cut on everything sold in the place except for us."

When the Buffetts moved to Washington, D.C., the only plus for Warren was the chance to upgrade his handicapping skills.

"The one thing I knew about Congress was that Congressmen had access to the Library of Congress-and the Library of Congress had everything that had ever been written. So when we got to Washington, I said, 'Pop, there's just one thing I want. I want you to ask the Library of Congress for every book they have on horse handicapping.' And my dad said, 'Well, don't you think they're going to think it's a little strange if the first thing a new Congressman asks for is all the books on horse handicapping?' I said, 'Pop, who was out there at the county fairs stumping for your election? Who was down there at the packinghouses ready to get to the cops if something happened?' I said, 'And you're coming up for reelection in two more years. You're going to need me. So this is payoff time.' And he got me hundreds of books on horse handicapping.2 "Then what I would do is read all these books. I sent away to a place in Chicago on North Clark Street where you could get old racing forms, months of them, for very little. They were old, so who wanted them? I would go through them, using my handicapping techniques to handicap one day and see the next day how it worked out. I ran tests of my handicapping ability day after day, all these different systems I had in my mind.

"There are two kinds of handicappers. There are speed handicappers and class handicappers. Speed handicappers figure out the horse with the best times in the past. The fastest horse will win. Class handicappers feel that the horse that's run against ten-thousand-dollar horses and done well and now is running against the five-thousand-dollar horses will beat them. Because, they say, the horse runs just fast enough to win.

"In horse racing it pays to understand both types of handicapping. But back then I was basically a speed guy. I was a quantitative guy to start with."

As he tested, thought, and observed, Warren discovered the Rules of the Racetrack: 1. Nobody ever goes home after the first race.

2. You don't have to make it back the way you lost it.

The racetrack counts on people to keep betting until they lose. Couldn't a good handicapper turn these rules around and win?

"The market is a racetrack too. But I was not developing elaborate theories in those days. I was just a little kid."

Betting in Washington was ubiquitous.

"I would go down to my dad's office fairly often, and there was actually a bookie in what was then called the Old House Office Building. You could go to the elevator shaft and yell 'Sammy!' or something like that and this kid would come up and take bets.

"Now, I used to do a little bookmaking too, for guys who wanted to bet on the Preakness or something like that. That's the end of the game I liked, the fifteen percent take with no risk. My dad, you know, was struggling somewhat to keep this under control. He was amused by it to some extent, but he could also see how it could veer off in the wrong direction."

During summer vacations, Warren returned to Omaha and went stooping at the Ak-Sar-Ben track, this time with his friend Stu Erickson.3 Back in Washington, he found a new friend to go to the racetrack with, someone who could advance his handicapping skills. Bob Dwyer, his high school golf coach, a potbellied, enterprising young man, made far more than his teacher's stipend by selling life insurance and ice chests and other things during the summer when school was out.4 The other members of the golf team viewed Dwyer as tough and crusty, but he took a shine to Warren, who had a way about him and played enthusiastically despite his glasses always fogging up.

One day Warren asked Dwyer to take him to the races. His coach said he needed permission. "The next morning," Dwyer says, "bright and early, he came prancing in with a note from his mother, saying it was all right to go to the races." So Dwyer wrote Warren some phony excuse to get out of class5 and then they took the Chesapeake & Ohio from Silver Spring, Maryland, over to the racetrack in Charleston, West Virginia. Going to the races with a teacher polished Warren's sophistication about handicapping. Dwyer taught Warren advanced skills in reading the most important tip sheet, the Daily Racing Form.

"I'd get the Daily Racing Form ahead of time and figure out the probability of each horse winning the race. Then I would compare those percentages to the odds. But I wouldn't look at the odds first, to avoid prejudicing myself. Sometimes you would find a horse where the odds were way, way off from the actual probability. You figure the horse has a ten percent chance of winning but it's going off at fifteen to one.*9 "The less sophisticated the track, the better. You have people betting on the jockey's colors, and you have them betting on their birthdays, you have them betting on the horses' names. And the trick, of course, is to be in a group where practically no one is analytical and you have a lot of data. So I would study the forms like crazy when I was a kid."

One grade behind Warren at Woodrow Wilson but slightly older, Bill Gray went to a few horse races with him. "He was very sharp with numbers. Very talkative.6 Very outgoing. We would discuss baseball, batting averages, sports.7 "He knew which horses he was going to pick the minute he got off the train. He would go down to the track and say, well, this horse is too much weight, or this horse, where he's come in the last few races has not been good enough, or his times are not good enough. He knew how to judge the horses." Warren made six-to ten-dollar bets, sometimes on the nose.*10 He only bet big if the odds looked good, but he had a way of risking some of his hard-earned paper-route money on the right horse. "He might change his mind as the different races came forward," says Gray. "But for a sixteen-year-old, that's not so common, you know?"

Then one time, Warren went to Charleston by himself. And he lost in the first race. But he didn't go home. He kept on betting and he kept on losing, until he had lost more than $175 and his pockets were stripped nearly bare.

"I came back. I went to the Hot Shoppe, and I treated myself to the biggest thing they offered-a giant fudge sundae or something-and there went all the rest of my money. While I ate, I figured out how many newspapers I had to deliver to make up what I had lost. I was going to have to work more than a week to make back the money. And I'd done it for dumb reasons.

"You're not supposed to bet every race. I'd committed the worst sin, which is that you get behind and you think you've got to break even that day. The first rule is that nobody goes home after the first race, and the second rule is that you don't have to make it back the way you lost it. That is so fundamental, you know."

Did he realize that he'd made an emotional decision?

"Oh, yeah. Oh, I was sick. It was the last time I ever did anything like that."

14.

The Elephant Philadelphia * 19471949 Warren graduated sixteenth out of 350 in his high school class, putting "future stockbroker" under his picture in the yearbook.1 The first thing he and Danly did with their freedom was to go in together and buy a used hearse. Warren parked the hearse in front of the house and used it to take a girl out on a date.2 When Howard came home later, he asked, "Who put that hearse out here?" Then Leila said one of their neighbors was gravely ill, and she was not having a hearse in front of the house. That was the end of the hearse.

While he and Don were selling the hearse, Warren gave up his paper routes and got a summer job as a relief circulation manager for the Times-Herald, moving up in the world. Whenever he had to substitute for his paper carriers, he rose at four a.m., and delivered the papers from a little Ford coupe he borrowed from David Brown, a young man from Fredericksburg who had a crush on Doris and who had gone into the Navy.3 Standing on the running board of the car with the door open, he coasted at about fifteen miles an hour, one hand reaching inside the car to hold on to the wheel, the other hand grabbing the papers and pitching them onto the subscribers' lawns. He rationalized that at such an early hour of the morning, nothing too terrible was likely to result from driving the car that way.4 Afterward he stopped by the Toddle House at four forty-five a.m. to treat himself to a double order of hash browns with paprika for breakfast. Then he went on to his second job, distributing papers at Georgetown University Hospital.

"I had to give the priests and nuns about a half a dozen papers free, which always irritated me no end. I thought they weren't supposed to be interested in secular things. But this was part of the deal. And then I went room by room, ward by ward.

"After they had the baby, the women in the obstetrics ward would see me come in and say, 'Oh, Warren! I'm going to give you something more valuable than a cash tip. I'm going to tell you when my baby was born and how much it weighed. Eight thirty-one a.m., six pounds and eleven ounces.'" The babies' birth times and weights were meant for betting on the "policy racket," the numbers game in Washington.5 Warren ground his teeth whenever he got useless information instead of a cash tip. As a handicapper, he would never have played the policy racket. The odds were terrible. "The policy racket paid off six hundred to one, and the guy that was your runner got ten percent of it. So you have a five hundred forty-to-one payoff on what was a thousand-to-one shot, basically. People made penny bets and dime bets. If you put a penny up, you might win $5.40 net. And everybody in town played. Some of my newspaper delivery customers used to ask me, 'Do you run policy numbers?' I never did. My dad would not have approved if I'd become a policy runner."

He was already a good enough oddsmaker to work in Vegas, but he probably would not have bet on the next thing his father did. Howard Buffett voted for a bill that actually passed, joining 330 other Congressmen who made the Taft-Hartley Act law over President Truman's veto. One of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever enacted in the United States, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act severely restricted the tactics used by labor unions. It made it illegal for them to support one another through secondary strikes and authorized U.S. Presidents to declare a national emergency and force striking workers back to work. It was referred to as a "slave labor" bill.6 Omaha was, of course, a union town, but it would never have occurred to Howard to vote according to his constituents' preferences; he always voted his principles.

So when the Buffetts went home to Omaha for a visit during the summer, and Warren went to a hometown baseball game with his father, he saw just how unpopular Howard had become among the blue-collar voters. "They introduced the dignitaries in between the doubleheader. And he stood up and everybody in the place started booing. He just stood there and didn't say anything. He could handle things like that. But you just can't imagine the effect that has on a kid."

Even the mildest forms of confrontation terrified him. But soon he would be standing on his own, out from under his father's wing. At almost seventeen, Warren was barely a kid. One year older and a few years earlier he might have been fighting in the war.

Instead of the military, in the fall he was starting college. The Buffetts had long taken for granted that Warren would attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school.7 Wharton was the nation's most important undergraduate business college and Penn the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin, creator of aphorisms like "he that goes a'borrowing goes a'sorrowing," "time is money," and "a penny saved is a penny earned." In theory, Penn and Warren, who had the energy of two people and hustled like a stevedore while other kids played, were a perfect fit.

However, Warren would have just as soon skipped the whole thing. "What was the point?" he asked himself. "I knew what I wanted to do. I was making enough money to live on. College was only going to slow me down." But he would never have defied his father on something so important, so he acquiesced.

Knowing their son's immaturity, the Buffetts arranged a roommate for him who was the son of some friends from Omaha. Five years older, Chuck Peterson had just returned from eighteen months' service in the war. He was a handsome young man-about-town, dating a different girl every night, and drinking. Naively, the Petersons supposed that Warren might settle Chuck down, while the Buffetts reckoned that an older boy might help Warren adjust to college.

In the fall of 1947, the entire family piled into the car and drove Warren to Philadelphia, where they deposited him and his raccoon coat in a little dormitory suite with a shared bathroom. Chuck had already moved in, but was out on a date somewhere.

As the Buffetts drove away to return to Washington, they left their son at a campus filled with people much like Chuck. An army of World War II veterans marched across College Green and filled the Quad, the centers of Penn university life. Their worldliness widened by years the gap Warren had felt between himself and his classmates ever since moving to Washington. On an organized, busy, social campus, his baggy T-shirts and worn tennis shoes stood out among the purposeful men dressed in sports coats and polished oxfords. Penn was a football powerhouse; its fall social life revolved around football dates, followed by fraternity parties. Warren loved sports, but the social requirements were beyond him. He was used to spending much of his time honing ideas, counting his money, organizing his collections, and playing music in the privacy of his room. At Penn, his solitude battered by the sixteen hundred flirting, necking, jitterbugging, keg-tapping, football-tossing members of the Class of 1951,8 he was a butterfly in a beehive.

The bees reacted much as expected to the butterfly that had flown into their midst. Chuck retained his military tidiness and the habit of constantly polishing his shoes. When he met his new roommate, Warren's disgraceful wardrobe shocked him. He soon discovered that the way Warren dressed symptomized something else. Just as Leila waited hand and foot on Howard and did all the work around the house, Warren had never been taught the most basic ways of taking care of himself.

Chuck stayed out late socializing as usual his first evening after they met. The next morning, he woke late to find the bathroom in a mess and his new roommate gone to early classes. When he saw Warren that evening, he said, "Clean up after yourself, will you?" "Okay, Chas-o," Warren said. "I came in this morning and you left a razor lying at the bottom of the sink," Chuck went on. "You left soap all over the sink, the towels were on the floor, and it's sloppier than hell. I like things neat." Warren appeared to agree. "Okay, Chas-o, okay, Chas-o," he said.

The next morning, when Chuck got up, he stepped through sodden towels on the bathroom floor to find tiny damp hairs covering the sink, and a brand-new, soaking-wet electric razor lying in the basin, tethered to the outlet in the wall by its cord. "Warren, lookit," said Chuck that evening. "Unplug the damn thing. Somebody's going to get electrocuted. I'm not going to pick it up out of the sink every morning. You're driving me nuts with your sloppiness." "Okay, okay, fine, Chas-o," said Warren.

The next day was exactly as before, the razor lying in the sink. Chuck realized that his words were bouncing off Warren's head. He lost his temper and decided to take action. He unplugged the razor, filled the sink with water, and threw the razor in.

The following morning, Warren had bought a new razor, plugged it in, and left the bathroom in the same state as before.

Chas-o gave up. He was living in a pigsty with a hyperactive teenager who hopped around in constant motion, drumming his hands, beating them on every nearby surface. Warren was obsessed with Al Jolson and played Jolson records day and night.9 He sang, over and over, imitating Jolson: "Mammy, my little Mammy, I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles, my Mammy!"10 Chuck needed to study, and he could not hear himself think inside the suite. Warren, on the other hand, had plenty of time to sing. He hadn't bought a lot of textbooks, but he had read the ones he bought at the beginning of the semester, before classes started, the way someone else might flip through a Life magazine. Then he threw them aside and never opened them again. This left him all night long to sing "Mammy" if he felt like it. Chuck thought he was going mad. Warren knew he was immature, but he couldn't help it.

"I probably wouldn't have fit in very well anyplace at that time. I was still out of sync with the world. But I was also younger than anybody else, and, on top of that, I was young for my age in many ways. I really didn't fit in socially."

Chuck's social life, on the other hand, was in full swing; he had pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Warren had little interest in Greek life but pledged his father's fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi. It was not a jock house nor particularly brutal, but the rituals of pledging turned him red-faced. The secret motto of Alpha Sig was zeal, humility, courage.11 Warren had plenty of the first two, but courage was his Achilles' heel. When the pledges were sent to Wanamaker's to buy extra-large women's panties and brassieres, he circled the underwear department for a looooong time before facing the snickering coed salesgirls.12 That fall, Leila and Doris struggled to describe Warren's crew-cut, slightly bucktoothed appearance truthfully on a radio show in Washington called Coffee with Congress.

Host: Incidentally, is Warren good-looking?

Leila: He was good-looking as a small child. He's just boyish-I wouldn't call him good-looking, but he's not poor-looking either.

Host: He's handsome-looking.

Leila: No, not handsome, just friendly.

Host: Let's take the girls' angle: Is he a cute boy?

Doris (diplomatically): I think he has a rugged sort of look.13 Despite the drumming and the "Mammy" singing, Chuck came to be fond of Warren, viewing him as a sort of goofy kid brother, although he still could not believe his roommate continued to wear beat-up Keds throughout the winter, and even when dressed up, was likely to wear one black shoe and one brown shoe without noticing.

Like many people who met Warren, Chuck began to feel the urge to take care of him. They had lunch together at the Student Union a couple of times a week. Warren always ordered the same thing: a minute steak, hash browns, and a Pepsi. Then he discovered chocolate sundaes topped with malted-milk powder and had those every day too. One day after lunch Chuck took Warren over to the new Ping-Pong table that had just been installed in the Student Union. After four years in Washington, Warren was so rusty that Chuck got the impression he had never played Ping-Pong. In the first couple of games Warren could just about return Chuck's serve. Chuck won easily.

Within a day or two, however, Warren played like a demon. The first thing every morning, he got up, went straight over to the Student Union, found a hapless victim, and slaughtered him at the Ping-Pong table. Before long, he was playing Ping-Pong three or four hours at a stretch every afternoon. Chuck could no longer hold his own. "I was his first victim at Penn," he recalls. But Ping-Pong kept Warren out of the suite and away from the record player while Chuck was studying.14 Ping-Pong, however, did not fulfill Penn's physical-education requirement. Rowing and sculling on the Schuylkill River were two of Penn's most popular sports. Gaily painted boathouses belonging to the school's many rowing clubs lined the riverbanks. Warren went out for the 150-pound freshman crew with the Vesper Boat Club. He rowed on a team of eight oarsmen guided by a coxswain. Rowing was repetitious and rhythmic, like weight lifting, basketball, golf, Ping-Pong, and his game of bolo, all activities that Warren enjoyed-but it was a team sport. Warren liked to shoot a basketball in his driveway because you could practice alone. He had never succeeded at team sports or learned to dance with a partner. He had been the leader of every stunt or business venture in which he had ever been involved. He couldn't play the part of the echo.

"It was miserable. The thing about crew is, you can't coast or fake it. You have to put your oar in the water at exactly the same time as everybody else. You can be unbelievably tired but you have to match the pace, and it must be done in unison. It's an incredibly grueling sport." He came back to the dorm every afternoon sweating, head bowed, hands bloodied and blistered, and dropped crew as soon as he could.