Chapter 1

OMAHA

Almost from the day that Dr. Pollard awakened him to the world, six pounds strong and five weeks early, Warren Buffett had a thirst for numbers. As a boy, he and his friend Bob Russell would pass an afternoon on the Russells’ front porch, which overlooked a busy intersection, recording the license-plate numbers of passing cars. When the sky darkened, they would go inside and spread open the Omaha World-Herald , counting how often each letter appeared and filling entire scrapbooks with progressions of numbers, as though they held the key to some Euclidean riddle. Often, Russell would reach for the almanac and read out a list of cities. One by one, Warren would spit back the populations. “I’d say a city, he’d hit it on the nose,” Russell would recall, half a century later. “I might say, ‘Davenport, Iowa; Topeka, Kansas; Akron, Ohio.’ If I gave him ten cities, he’d hit every one.” Baseball scores, horse-racing odds—every numeral was fodder for that precocious memory. Combed, scrubbed, and stuffed into a pew of Dundee Presbyterian Church, Warren would pass the time on Sundays calculating the life spans of ecclesiastical composers. He would stand in the living room with a paddle and ball, counting, counting by the hour. He would play Monopoly for what seemed forever—counting his imagined riches.

Blue-eyed, with a fair complexion and pink cheeks, Warren was intrigued not merely with numbers, but with money . His first possession was a nickel-coated money changer, given to him by his Aunt Alice at Christmas and thereafter proudly strapped to his belt. When he was five, he set up a gum stand on his family’s sidewalk and sold Chiclets to passersby. After that, he sold lemonade—not on the Buffetts’ quiet street, but in front of the Russells’ house, where the traffic was heavier.

At nine, Warren and “Russ” would count the bottle caps from the soda machine at the gas station across from the Russells’ house. This was not idle counting, but a primitive market survey. How many Orange Crush caps? How many Cokes and root beers? The boys would cart the caps in a wagon and store them in Warren’s basement, piles of them. The idea was, which brand had the highest sales? Which was the best business ?

At an age when few children knew what a business was, Warren would get rolls of ticker tape from his stockbroker father, set them on the floor, and decipher the ticker symbols from his father’s Standard & Poor’s. He would search the local golf course for used but marketable golf balls. He would go to Ak-Sar-Ben ^* racetrack and scour the saw-dusted floors, turning over torn and discarded stubs and often finding a winning ticket that had been erroneously thrown away. In the sweltering Nebraska summers, Warren and Russ would carry golf clubs for the rich gentlemen at the Omaha Country Club and earn $3 for the day. And at dusk, as they rocked on the Russells’ front-porch glider in the stillness of the Midwestern twilight, the parade of Nashes and Stude-bakers and the clanging of the trolley car would put a thought in Warren’s mind. All of that traffic with no place to go but right by the Russells’ house, he would say—if only there were a way to make some money off it. Russell’s mom, Evelyn, recalled Warren after fifty years. “All that traffic ,” he would say to her. “What a shame you aren’t making money from the people going by.” As if the Russells could set up a toll booth on North 52nd Street. “What a shame , Mrs. Russell.”

What, then, was the source?

Warren was the second of three children, and the only son. His mother was a petite, feisty woman from a small town in Nebraska. She had a lively temperament and, as was said of women relegated to a supporting role, “a good head for numbers.” Warren’s father, a serious but kind man, was surely the dominant influence in his life. Opening to Warren’s eyes the world of stocks and bonds, he must have planted a seed, but insofar as such things are knowable, Howard Buffett’s acumen for numbers was not on a par with his son’s. Nor was his passion for making money. What was it, then, that prompted Warren to turn from that mannered, comfortable household—to crawl along the floor of the racetrack as though it were a bed of pearl oysters? What was it that would enable him, years later, to stun his colleagues in business-time and again—by computing columns of figures in his head, and by recalling encyclopedic volumes of data as easily as he had the population of Akron? Warren’s younger sister, Roberta, said flatly, “I think it was in his genes.”

The Buffetts were said to be gentle and sweet-natured, traits that endured. They were skilled at business and loath to spend a dollar. The earliest known Buffett (pronounced Buffett ) in America, John Buffett, was a serge weaver of French Huguenot origin. He married Hannah Titus, in Huntington, on the north shore of Long Island, in 1696. ¹ The Buffetts remained on Long Island, as farmers, until after the Civil War. But they had a streak of ambition, which clashed with the family’s frugal ways. In 1867, Sidney Homan Buffett was employed at clearing land for Zebulon Buffett, his grandfather. On hearing of his fifty-cent-per-diem wage, Sidney became so disgusted that he put down his ax and headed west. He took a job driving a stage out of Omaha, and in 1869 opened the S. H. Buffett grocery. With Omaha still in its frontier beginnings, the Buffetts were ensconced in the city’s commercial life, a mile and a half from the wooded site of the future office of America’s richest man.

Omaha was a cluster of frame and log buildings, set against the rugged bluffs rising from the Missouri River. Though the plains stood at its door, the town itself was hilly. The area had been wilderness until 1854, when a treaty with the Maha Indians (later the Omahas) opened the Nebraska Territory to settlement. The seminal moment in its growth was in 1859, when an Illinois railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln visited the area and took a parcel of land as collateral for a defaulted loan. A few years later, President Lincoln designated the city as the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific Railroad. ²

Sidney Buffett opened his store, with impeccable timing, three months after the railroads joined the continent. Omaha was already “the great jumping-off place” for engines belching across the plains. ³ It soon was teeming with settlers, drifters, speculators, Civil War veterans, railroad men, ex-convicts, and prostitutes, many of whom happened upon the Buffett grocery, where Sidney sold quail, wild ducks, and prairie chickens over the counter. Zebulon was highly dubious of his prospects. Writing to his twenty-one-year-old grandson, Zebulon stressed that prudence in business was the Buffetts’ watchword.

But the young city prospered, and Sidney prospered with it. By the 1870s, Omaha had cast-iron architecture and an opera house. By the turn of the century, it had skyscrapers, cable cars, and a swelling population of 140,000. Sidney built a bigger store and brought two sons into the business. The younger of these, Ernest—the future grandfather of Warren—had the family knack for business. He quarreled with his brother over a girl, and married her, whereupon the brothers stopped speaking. In 1915, Ernest left the downtown store and established a new one—Buffett & Son—in the city’s western reaches.

Once again, the Buffett timing was shrewd. Omaha’s population was migrating west from the river. Sensing opportunity in the suburbs, Ernest cultivated a delivery trade and sold on credit. Soon, rich families’ cooks were phoning orders to Buffett & Son. The business grew, and Ernest hewed to the Buffetts’ tightfisted ways. He paid the stock clerks the lordly sum of $2 for an eleven-hour shift, accompanied by a lecture on the evils of the minimum wage and similar “socialistic” mandates. Tall and imposing, Ernest did not merely run the store—he tyrannized it.

Ernest’s son Howard—Warren’s father—had no interest in becoming a third-generation grocer. Howard was independent-minded, like Ernest, but warmer and without the bluster. He worked briefly on an oil pipeline in Wyoming, but his true interests were in the life of the mind. At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Howard was editor of the Daily Nebraskan , and aspired to a career in journalism. Though not particularly handsome, he had dark hair and an arresting gaze. As fraternity president, he had his pick of society belles. But in his senior year, Howard met a hardscrabble country girl who was anything but society.

Leila Stahl had grown up in West Point, Nebraska, a bleak, rural town of 2,200 people. Her father, John Ammon Stahl, owned a weekly paper, the Cuming County Democrat . Most of the people in town were Germanic, and the English-speaking Stahls were outsiders. Leila’s mother felt particularly isolated and spent much of the time bedridden and depressed. Leila and her brother and two sisters had to fend for themselves, and Leila had to help her father at the County Democrat . From the fifth grade on, she would sit on a high stool and set type by hand, and later by Linotype. Sometimes when a train stopped in West Point she would rush on board and interview passengers to fill the news columns. On Thursdays, this slight schoolgirl stood beside the fly of the giant press, firmly gripping the sheets of newsprint and taking care to pull each one at just the right moment. In time, Leila developed pounding headaches, synchronized with the press run of the County Democrat .

After Leila graduated from high school, at sixteen, she had to work three more years to afford tuition at Lincoln. She appeared in Howard Buffett’s office, looking for a job at the Daily Nebraskan , having survived her childhood with a tart tongue and a wry sense of humor. She was pretty, just over five feet, with soft features and wavy light brown hair. As she would put it, she “majored in marrying” ⁵ —not an unreasonable course of study for a woman facing the prospect of returning to West Point.

Howard hired her, and immediately asked her for a date. The attraction was immediate on both sides. When his graduation neared, Howard asked for her hand. John Stahl, an educated man, had hoped that his daughter would finish college, but gave his blessing. The wedding was in West Point, the day after Christmas, 1925, in ten-below-zero weather. According to a memoir that Leila wrote for her grandchildren, Howard later told her, “When I married you it was the best bargain I ever made.” There was no thought of a honeymoon. Directly the wedding ended, they boarded a bus for Omaha.

Howard had been offered a newspaper job, the stuff of his dreams, but a friend of his father’s had a $25-a-week spot for him in an insurance company. Howard’s capitulation was a commentary on the times. As Leila noted, “He deferred to his father, who had paid for college.” ⁶

The couple moved into a two-bedroom white clapboard bungalow with a coal furnace, on Barker Avenue. For Leila, it was a hard beginning. Raised by an invalid mother, she was unprepared as a home-maker. As Howard used the car, Leila walked to the streetcar when she took temporary secretarial or printing jobs—sometimes, in those first years, making more in a week than he did. Then she would walk back to a load of housework. In 1927, Leila had an eye operation, after which her headaches began to recur. The next year, when Doris, her first child, was born, Leila ran a fever of 105, alarming everyone. Two years later the couple had a son, Warren Edward. It was a humid summer’s day—August 30, 1930—a cloudburst breaking the eighty-nine-degree heat.

From the start, Warren was cautious beyond his years. When he learned to walk, it was with his knees bent, as if ensuring that he wouldn’t have far to fall. When his mother took Doris and Warren to church-circle meetings, Doris would explore and get lost, but Warren would sit dutifully by her. “Never much trouble as a little child,” Leila would write.

In a picture taken when Warren was two, he appears as a chunky, blondish boy in white laced boots and white socks, one hand grasping a cube-shaped block, with a slight smile and a deep gaze. His hair, reddish blond at first, turned to auburn, but his temperament didn’t change. He didn’t wander where he was unfamiliar, nor did he cause trouble or get into fights. Roberta, younger than Warren by three years, would protect him from neighborhood bullies. Once, Howard brought home some boxing gloves and invited a boy over to box with Warren. “They were never used afterwards,” Leila noted. So gentle was Warren’s nature that he inspired in his sisters, as he would in others, a protective instinct. He didn’t seem equipped to fight.

Warren’s first years were difficult ones for the family. Howard was working as a securities salesman with Union Street Bank. The curmudgeonly Ernest thought it a dubious profession. He summed it up in a letter to Warren’s Uncle Clarence:

Howard scribbled in the margin, “A real booster for my business!” But within a year, Ernest looked prophetic. On August 13, 1931—two weeks shy of Warren’s first birthday—his father returned from work with the news that his bank had closed. It was the defining, faith-shattering scene of the Great Depression. His job was gone, his savings were lost. ⁸ Ernest gave his son a little time to pay the grocery bills—a bitter pill, for Howard had inherited the Buffett disdain for borrowing. “Save your credit, for that is better than money.” His prospects were so bleak that he considered moving the family back to West Point.

But in short order, Howard announced that Buffett, Sklenicka & Co. had opened its doors in the Union State Bank building on Farnam Street—the same street where Warren would later live and work. Howard and a partner, George Sklenicka, peddled “Investment Securities, Municipal, Corporation and Public Utilities, Stocks and Bonds.” Howard now drew on his courage and will, for the market crash had tarnished the public’s trust. Omaha, at first, had thought itself immune to the Depression, but by 1932, wheat prices had plunged and farmers were eating in soup kitchens. Staunchly Republican Omaha voted Roosevelt in a landslide; the next year, eleven thousand registered for relief. Born in those meanest of times, Buffett Sklenicka appears at first to have been a business only in name—a place where Howard could hang his hat and work on commission. His first sales were long in coming, and the commissions were small. Ernest, who was president of the Omaha Rotary, informed his fellow Rotarians that as his well-intentioned son didn’t know much about stocks, they would be advised not to give him their business. ⁹ Leila managed to put dinner on the table, but she often skipped herself to give Howard a full portion. The family was so strapped that Leila stopped going to her church circle for want of twenty-nine cents to buy a pound of coffee.

And the Buffetts were wracked by those extremes of nature that in the Midwest seemed as if fused with the Depression itself. “The Great Depression began,” Leila wrote, with “a terrible, 112-degree heat.” Dust storms blew in from Oklahoma, and Omahans vainly sealed their homes against the locusts. On the day of Warren’s fourth birthday party, a “high searing wind” blew the paper plates and napkins off the table and buried the porch in red dust. Warren and Doris would bear the suffocating heat outside, waiting for the ice man to hop from his horse-drawn cart and hand them ice slivers to suck on. Worse than the heat was the bitter winter cold. Bundled up, Warren and his sister would walk eight long blocks to the Columbian School, in weather so frigid that salesmen kept their motors running as they paid their calls, for fear that they wouldn’t be able to restart their engines.

By the time that Warren began school, his father’s fortunes were rapidly improving. When Warren was six, the Buffetts moved to a more spacious Tudor brick home with a sloping, shingled roof, on suburban North 53rd Street. The bad times in the Buffett home were not discussed; they were banished.

But they seem to have deeply affected Warren. He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to become very, very rich. He thought about it before he was five years old. And from that time on, he scarcely stopped thinking of it.

When Warren was six, the Buffetts took a rare vacation to Lake Okoboji, in northern Iowa, where they rented a cabin. Warren managed to buy a six-pack of Cokes for twenty-five cents; then he waddled around the lake selling the sodas at five cents each, for a nickel profit. Back in Omaha, he bought soda pop from his grandfather’s grocery and sold it door-to-door on summer nights while other children played in the street.

From then on, such endeavors were unceasing. And Warren’s moneymaking had a purpose . He wasn’t thinking about getting pocket money for then, but about advancing toward his great aspiration.

When Warren was seven, he was hospitalized with a mysterious fever. Doctors removed his appendix, but he remained so ill that the doctors feared he would die. Even when his father fetched his favorite noodle soup, Warren refused to eat. But left alone, he took a pencil and filled a page with numbers. These, he told his nurse, represented his future capital. “I don’t have much money now,” Warren said cheerfully, “but someday I will and I’ll have my picture in the paper.” ¹⁰ Purportedly in his death throes, Warren sought succor not in soup but in dreams of money.

Howard Buffett was determined that Warren would never repeat his own experience of hardship. Also, he resolved that as a parent, he would never follow the example of Ernest and demean his son. He unfailingly expressed confidence in Warren and supported him in whatever he did. And though Warren had his mother’s high spirits, his universe revolved around his father.

Six feet tall, Howard towered over the family, physically and in other respects. He worked hard at supporting the family, owning not only his brokerage but also the South Omaha Feed Co., a small business by Omaha’s stockyards. But he was not excited by money; his passions were religion and politics. He was a self-consciously moral man and had the courage of his beliefs, which were conservative in the extreme. (“To the right of God,” a local banker said.)

Convinced that Roosevelt was destroying the dollar, Howard gave gold coins to his children and bought pretty things for the house—a crystal chandelier, sterling silver flatware, and oriental throw rugs—all with a view that tangibles were better than dollars. He even stocked up on canned foods and purchased a farm, intended to be the family’s refuge from the hellfire of inflation.

Howard also stressed a principle that was more enduring than any of his political opinions, namely, the habit of independent thought. With his children at his side, Howard would recite a favorite maxim from Emerson:

Howard drilled the children in religious values, but also in secular ones. He taught an adult Sunday school class, but he also served on the public school board. Scarcely a week went by without his reminding Warren and his sisters of their duty—not just to God, but to community. He was fond of telling them, “You are not required to carry the whole burden—nor are you permitted to put down your share.”

As was not, perhaps, so uncommon for a man of that era, he not only mouthed such aphorisms but did his best to live by them. He did not ever drink or smoke. When a favored customer’s securities turned out poorly, Howard felt bad enough to repurchase them for his own account.

“You are a good citizen,” he would respond when told of some social malady. “What are you going to do about it?”

He sat, always, in a red leather chair in the living room, with a Victrola at his ear blaring out Stephen Foster and cherished hymns and marches. A creature of habit, the dimpled stockbroker would take the family to Sunday dinner at the bustling terra-cotta Union Station, and then to Evans Ice Cream on Center Street. Though he dressed soberly in dark suits, he smiled easily. Herbert Davis, at one time Howard’s associate, said, “He was exactly what you’d want in a father.”

His children lived in fear of disappointing him. Doris refused to even sit with friends who were drinking beer, lest her father see them and associate her with such sinfulness. “He had all these high principles,” Roberta recalled. “You felt you had to be a good person.”

Warren idealized him the most of all. He was close to his dad, and loose and easy with him. In church, once, Warren told his rather off-key father, “Pops, either you can sing or I can sing, but we both can’t sing at the same time.” Howard affectionately called him “Fireball.”

When Warren was ten, Howard took him to New York—as he did, in turn, each of his children—on the overnight train. Leila watched Warren go off with his “best friend” in hand and his big stamp album under his arm. Their itinerary included a baseball game, a stamp display, and “some place with Lionel toy trains.” ¹¹ On Wall Street, Warren went to the stock exchange.

Warren was already as fascinated by stocks as other boys were by model aircraft. He frequently visited Howard’s now prosperous brokerage, which had moved to the marble-columned Omaha National Bank Building, at 17th and Farnam. Up in his father’s office, Warren would gaze at the stock and bond certificates, stowed behind gold-painted bars and endowed, in Warren’s eyes, with a mysterious allure. ¹² Often, he would race down the steps to the Harris Upham brokerage, which was in the same building and was frequented by financial men in Omaha as a source of stock quotations. Jesse Livermore, the infamous East Coast speculator, would stop by when he was in town, scribble an order on a piece of paper, and silently depart. And the Harris Upham brokers indulged the young, big-eared Warren by allowing him to chalk the prices of stocks on the blackboard. ¹³

At home, Warren began to chart the prices of stocks on his own. Observing their ups and downs, he was bewitched by the idea of deciphering their patterns. At eleven, he took the plunge and bought three shares of Cities Service preferred, as well as three shares for his sister Doris, at $38 a share. “I knew then he knew what he was doing,” Doris would recall. “The boy lived and breathed numbers.” But Cities Service plunged to 27. They sweated it out, and the stock recovered to 40, whereupon Warren sold, netting, after commission, his first $5 of profit in the market. Directly he sold, Cities Service climbed to 200. It was his first lesson in patience.

Warren did better at the track. Intrigued by the mathematics of odds-making, he and Russell developed a tipping system for horse players. After a few days, they noticed that the system worked, so they penciled out their picks under the banner Stable-Boy Selections and took a pile of copies to Ak-Sar-Ben racetrack. Quoting Russell: “We found out we could sell it. We were waving them around, calling ‘Get your Stable-Boy Selections .’ But we didn’t have a license and they shut us down.” ¹⁴

Warren’s exploits were always based on numbers, which he trusted above all else. In contrast, he did not subscribe to his family’s religion. Even at a young age, he was too mathematical, and too logical, to make the leap of faith. He adopted his father’s ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity. In a person who is honest in his thoughts, and especially in a boy, such untempered logic can only lead to one terrifying fear—the fear of dying. And Warren was stricken with it. ¹⁵

Every week, no matter if the snows were four feet high, Leila and Howard insisted that Warren go to Sunday school. But it didn’t sustain him. When he sat in church, calculating the life spans of the ecclesiastics, there was a purpose to it. He wanted to know whether faith would result in living a longer life. ¹⁶ Not faith in an afterlife, as a believer would have had, but a concern for living longer in this one.

He and Bob Russell would be sitting on the Russells’ front-porch glider, in the stillness of an afternoon, and as if brought on by a sudden prairie twister, Warren would say, “Russ, there is one thing I am scared of. I am afraid to die.” He brought it up maybe every year or so—often enough so that it stuck in Russell’s mind. It seemed disconnected from everything else that Russell knew of Warren, who was usually so buoyant. Sometimes Russell would put birdseed on the floor of the milk box and trap a bird inside and invariably, Warren would beg him not to harm it. Russell would pull a string, tied to the door of the milk box, and let it go. But he couldn’t release Warren from the fear of his own mortality.

“If you do what God gave you the talent to do, you can be successful and help others and die with a smile,” Russell would say.

“Bob, I’m just scared,” Warren would reply.

Russell, a Roman Catholic, did not understand. He would wonder where it came from, why a guy who had so much going for him was so afraid. But there was an aspect of Warren’s life at home that Russell did not know about.

To outside appearances, the Buffett household was the ideal: loving, prosperous, inspired by high morals, and centered on the family. And such particulars were genuine. Leila would refer to the day she met Howard as “the luckiest day of my life.”

She treated her husband like a king—a benevolent king, but a king nonetheless. A practical woman, Leila had ideas of her own about stocks, but she didn’t mention them to Howard. Even when Leila had pounding headaches, she was careful not to bother Howard or disturb his reading. Her aim was to be a perfect wife. Warren’s friends knew her as a tiny, cheerful woman with a pretty smile—sweet and sociable and all atwitter , like the good witch of the North.

But when the strain of trying to be perfect was too much for Leila, she would turn on Warren and his sisters with the wrath of God. Without warning, that good-humored woman would become furious beyond words, and rage at her children with an unrelenting meanness, sometimes not letting up for hours. She scolded and degraded her children. Nothing they had done measured up. She compared, criticized, and dredged up every imaginable failing.

In Leila’s fury, she seemed as if driven by some horrible injustice. Nothing that Warren or his sisters had done would escape her notice; no transgression, however slight, was too small for one of her vicious rebukes. Even when they had committed no crime, her imagination supplied one.

As far as Warren and his sisters knew, Leila’s moods were wholly unpredictable, and therefore all the more terrifying. And when one came over her there was no escape. She was a strong woman, strong as the girl who had run the Linotype at age eleven. If they tried to break free she would snap at them, “ I’m not finished .” ¹⁷ And then, suddenly, the tempest would be over. Then the sweet little woman would return.

Once, in more recent years, one of Warren’s sons, who was home from college, called Leila to say hello. She suddenly lit into him with all her fury. She called him a terrible person for not calling more often, and detailed his supposedly innumerable failings of character, and went on for two entire hours. When Warren’s son put down the phone, he was in tears. Warren said softly, “Now you know how I felt every day of my life.”

Sometime after Leila left West Point, her family suffered repeated tragedies. One of her sisters committed suicide; another sister and Leila’s mother were institutionalized. Whatever the streak of madness or emotional imbalance that the Stahl women suffered, Leila at least survived.

But Warren and his sisters had to deal with the shrapnel from her fury on their own. There was certainly no discussion of it in the Buffett home. One morning, when Warren was young, Howard came downstairs and warned him, “Mom is on the warpath again.” ¹⁸ But more often, after Howard had left the house, Warren and the girls would listen for the telltale tone of her voice and warn one another. Their parents didn’t argue; the conflict was between Leila and her kids. And it was a conflict that Warren and his sisters had no chance of winning.

Warren coped with this hopeless battle by not fighting back. “He didn’t get mad. He kept it to himself,” his sister Roberta said. Jerry Moore, who lived across the street, observed that Warren didn’t fight with anyone. He shied away from the usual neighborhood scrapes—from any sort of conflict.

He didn’t mention his mother’s “moods” to his friends, and there was nothing in his upbeat manner that would have betrayed them. But some of the boys noticed that Warren spent more time with them at their homes than he did at his own. Mrs. Russell used to say, “I put him out with the cat and brought him in with the milk.” Byron Swanson, a classmate, would come home—in that halcyon time when Americans left their homes unlocked—and find Warren, innocently and rather charmingly, sitting in his kitchen, drinking a Pepsi and eating potato chips. Walter Loomis said his mother had to chase Warren out when Loomis’s father came home so the family could have dinner. (In retrospect, he added dryly, “Too bad we kicked him out.”)

Later, Warren’s son Peter would wonder if his father’s success was driven in part by the urge to get out of the house. The question is unanswerable, but he had the urge from somewhere . Warren would sit on the fire escape at Rosehill elementary school and flatly tell his chums that he would be rich before he was thirty-five. ¹⁹ He never came across as being a braggart, or swell-headed. (In Russell’s homely phrase, “his cap always fit.”) He just had this conviction about himself.

He would bury himself in a favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000 , an exhortation to future Rockefellers with stories such as “Building a Business on Homemade Fudge” and “Mrs. MacDougall Turned $38 into a Million.” How vividly did Warren imagine himself as the man in the illustration—dwarfed by a mountain of coins that brought more ecstasy than any mountain of candy! Surely, he was the reader of the editor’s dreams—so well did he seize on the book’s advice to “begin, begin” whatever schemes one might, but, by all means, not to wait.

On 53rd Street, Warren was known as a bookworm, and was certified in the neighborhood lore as having a “photographic memory.” He was tall for his age, and liked to play sports, but was rather ungainly. He talked up his financial exploits, however, with a contagious passion. And when Warren talked, his friends perked up their ears. He didn’t persuade the other boys to join him so much as he attracted them—a fireball, as his father said, drawing moths. Warren recruited Stuart Erickson, Russell, and Byron Swanson to go to Ak-Sar-Ben to scavenge for tickets. He enlisted half the neighborhood to gather golf balls. Soon he had bushel baskets of golf balls in his bedroom, organized by brand and price. Bill Pritchard, a neighbor, recalled, “He’d hand out a dozen golf balls. We’d sell ’em, and he’d take his cut.” Warren and Erickson even set up a golf-ball stand at Elmwood Park, until, as Erickson recalled, business was so good that “somebody snitched on us and the pro threw us out.”

A Saturday Evening Post profile of the Omaha of those years saw a barren city—in the telling quip, west of civilization, which stopped in Des Moines, and east of the scenery, which began with the Rocky Mountains. ²⁰ It was distinguished only for its “conformity”; extreme only in its weather. Its contribution to culture was the Swanson dinner. Overlaid on this myth of Omaha as a cultural wasteland was a more romantic view of Omaha as an unspoiled refuge from the sinful East—as “simple” and vaguely pastoral. While this had an element of truth, it was greatly exaggerated. It would partly account for a later tendency to describe Buffett as oracular, rather than as talented and savvy, as a New Yorker would have been described—as the “Oracle of Omaha” or, repeatedly, the “Wizard of Omaha.” (The Wizard of Oz did hail from Omaha.)

But Omaha was not a barren place to Warren. The Buffetts and their neighbors were educated and urban and part of the cultural mainstream. Fred Astaire learned to dance at the Chambers Academy on Farnam Street; Henry Fonda, a local boy, appeared on Omaha stages. Warren’s Omaha was a small city—220,000 people—but by no means a small town. Carl Sandburg, who shoveled coal there, called it “Omaha, the roughneck, [which] feeds armies, eats and swears from a dirty face.” ²¹

The summer that Warren was eleven, Howard, who wanted his children to experience the supposed purity of farm life, took out an ad for a rural home. For a few weeks, Warren and Doris were boarded by a farmer named Elmer Benne. Warren savored Mrs. Benne’s pies, but he didn’t care for cows or stalks of corn. A silo was just as remote to him as the modern Art Deco skyscrapers of Omaha were to a farm boy. Warren was a city kid.

On 53rd Street, he knew the people in every house. And there was a sameness to the homes, with their twin gables, brown brick, and center doorways. He recognized the truck from Roberts Dairy, and the music of the trolley and the not-too-distant freight trains, and the aroma of coffee from the roasting plant downtown, and even, when a wind blew from the south on warm summer evenings, the thick, intolerable smell of the meatpacking plants. Whether on foot, on his three-speed, or by streetcar, he could fan out over the city, to the golf courses, to his father’s office, to his grandfather’s store. Whatever Warren’s problems with his mother or his torment in church, his city was his great, sustaining constant.

But the violent shock that upset all America in December 1941 also threatened Warren’s life in Omaha. The Sunday of Pearl Harbor, the Buffetts were paying a visit to Grandpa Stahl, in West Point. On the drive home, they listened to martial music. For the next few months, as America got used to war, Warren’s life went on as before.

But in 1942, the Republicans in Nebraska’s second congressional district were unable to find a candidate who would run against the party of a popular wartime president. In desperation, the GOP turned to an outspoken New Deal hater: Howard Buffett.

Howard, an isolationist, was given little chance of winning. On the stump, his venom was directed not at Hitler or Mussolini but at Franklin Roosevelt.

Inveighing against inflation and big government, Howard was forty years ahead of his time. But in Omaha, he was personally popular. He had little money—his expenses would amount to only $2,361—but he campaigned tenaciously.

On election day, Howard typed out a concession speech and retired at nine o’clock. The next day, he discovered he had won. He would call it “one of the happiest surprises” of his life.

Warren realized his fate with a jolt: for the first time in his twelve-plus years, he was leaving Omaha. In a family photograph taken just after the election, Warren looked decidedly uneasy, his handsome face set in a vague stare, his tightly pursed lips managing only the slightest suggestion of a smile.

As space in wartime Washington was scarce, Howard rented a home in the charming but remote Virginia town of Fredericksburg. The house stood on a hill, overlooking the Rappahannock River. It was a rambling white Colonial place with a front porch and roses. To Roberta, it looked “like something out of the movies.” Warren hated it.

Cinematic though it may have been, Fredericksburg was isolated, Southern, and unfamiliar. Any change would have been unwelcome to Warren, and this one turned his world upside down. Not only had he been yanked away from friends and neighborhood, but he was separated during the week from his father, who was residing at the Dodge Hotel, in Washington, fifty miles north. The freshman congressman told his family that he would serve only one term, but that didn’t comfort his son. Away from Omaha and from all that he knew, Warren was “miserably homesick.” ²³

Though he was desperate to leave, it was not in his nature to confront his folks. He merely told them that he was suffering from a mysterious “allergy” and that he couldn’t sleep at night. Of course, his Zen-like stoicism was perfectly calculated to unnerve them. He would recall, “I told my parents I couldn’t breathe. I told them not to worry about it, to get a good night’s sleep themselves, and I’d just stand up all night.” ²⁴ Naturally, they were worried sick about him. ^† Meanwhile, Warren wrote to Grandpa Ernest and told him that he was unhappy. In short order, Ernest wrote back and suggested that Warren move in with him and his Aunt Alice and finish the eighth grade in Omaha. After a few weeks in Fredericksburg, his parents agreed.

Warren went back on the train, sharing an overnight compartment with Hugh Butler, a Nebraska senator. At daybreak, Senator Butler, noticing that the youngster had passed the night soundly, commented, “I thought you couldn’t sleep.” Warren replied airily, “Oh, I got rid of that in Pennsylvania.” ²⁵

In Omaha, Warren’s spirits revived. Aunt Alice, a free-spirited home economics teacher, was a kind guardian, and she took an interest in Warren. Like other teachers, she was attracted to his brightness and curiosity.

Grandpa Ernest, an instinctive teacher, also took a shine to him. Ernest was working on a book, and each night he dictated a few pages to Warren. ²⁶ The recherché title was “How to Run a Grocery Store, and a Few Things I Have Learned About Fishing.” The thrust of it is evident from a letter in which Ernest confidently declared that supermarkets were a passing fad:

Fortunately, “How to Run a Grocery Store” was never published.

But Warren went to work at Buffett & Son, where he observed his grandfather’s maxims firsthand. Ernest took it upon himself to deduct two pennies a day from Warren’s meager salary—a gesture which, along with his lectures on the work ethic, was intended to impress upon Warren the intolerable costs of government programs such as Social Security. For a twelve-year-old boy, the work itself was hard: lifting crates, hauling soda pop. Warren didn’t care for it. He didn’t like the smell of groceries. When fruit spoiled, he had to clean the bins. ²⁸

But he liked the store. Buffett & Son was a cozy nook of a grocery, with squeaky wooden floors, rotating fans, and rows of wooden shelves that reached to the ceiling. When someone wanted a can from the upper shelf, Warren or another clerk would move a sliding ladder to the proper spot and ascend to the summit.

It was the first successful business that Warren had seen. His Uncle Fred, who stood behind the counter, had a cheerful word for every shopper. With its pungent, fresh-baked breads, ripe cheeses, and unwrapped cookies and nuts, Buffett & Son had something —an adherence, perhaps, to Grandpa’s penny-pinching virtues—that pulled people back. ²⁹

Charlie Munger, Warren’s future business partner, worked there on Saturdays (though he did not meet Warren until years later). Munger saw in the store the inculcation of a culture, something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Nobody ever loafed. “You were just goddam busy from the first hour of morning to night.” When Bill Buffett, Warren’s cousin, would trudge in a few minutes late, he would be greeted by his portly, white-haired grandfather, pocket watch in hand, bellowing from a second-floor balcony, “Billy, what time is it?”

While living at Ernest’s, Warren often went to the home of Carl Falk, his father’s then business partner, for lunch. He would curl up with an investment book from Falk’s study—much more his cup of tea than groceries—while Mrs. Falk made lunch. One time, while Warren was slurping Mary Falk’s chicken noodle soup, he declared that he would be a millionaire by age thirty—and enigmatically added, “and if not, I’m going to jump off the tallest building in Omaha.”

Mary Falk was horrified, and told him not to repeat it. Warren looked at her and laughed. Nonetheless, she couldn’t resist his charm, and always made him welcome in the Falk home. Mary Falk seems to have been the first to ask: “Warren, why this drive to make so much money?”

“It’s not that I want money,” Warren replied. “It’s the fun of making money and watching it grow.”

The final months of eighth grade, Warren enjoyed a reprieve. He was reunited with his chums, and he had the run of the city, from the Buffett store in the western suburbs to the cobblestone streets downtown, bustling with open-air markets and red-brick and cast-iron warehouses, where Sidney, the first Buffett in Omaha, had set up his store, three-quarters of a century earlier. Already the fourth generation of Buffetts in Omaha, Warren was immensely at home there. He had the city’s informal style, its plain prairie syntax, and also its opaque, unemotional cover. He was hardly “simple,” but in his essential features—his dawning self-reliance, his ambitious but prudent capitalist zeal, and his composed, calm exterior—he was unmistakably Midwestern. Alas, by the fall of 1943, Warren had run out of excuses for not joining the family in Washington. His reprieve had run out.