Chapter 2

RUNAWAY

The Buffetts had moved to a four-bedroom house in Spring Valley, an outlying section of Washington, on Northwest 49th Street. The home was white-painted brick, with an open porch in front and a driveway that sloped to the rear. It was a typically modest young congressman’s home—the Richard Nixons would be their neighbors—a short walk from Massachusetts Avenue. Behind the house was nothing but woods.

Warren’s new life revolved around his job as a carrier for the Washington Post . Now thirteen, he kept a record of his earnings and filed a tax return—and defiantly refused to let his dad pay the taxes. ¹

But aside from his paper route, Warren was profoundly unhappy. At Alice Deal Junior High, he caused a bit of trouble for his teachers, and his grades were mediocre. ² Young for his class, having skipped a grade, he was bespectacled and out of the social stream. His appearance was so slovenly that the principal warned Leila that he had better shape up. ³

In June, at the end of that first, unhappy year, Warren ran away—the first real rebellion of his life. He and Roger Bell, the son of a Missouri congressman, and one other chum put out their thumbs for Hershey, Pennsylvania. Warren knew of a golf course there and thought they could stay a few days and caddie. But for once, economics were not his motivation. He was mad at his folks, mad at being in Washington-mad all around. ⁴

The boys arrived at nightfall, without so much as a toothbrush, and checked into a room at the Community Inn. In the morning, no sooner were they out the door than the police stopped them. Bell was short, while Warren and the other boy were close to six feet. From a distance, the police thought Bell much younger—perhaps a kidnap victim—and took the trio in for questioning. One may imagine Warren, just shy of fourteen, glibly persuading the authorities of their innocence without saying much about what they were doing. The police let them go, but their balloon was pricked. They thumbed their way home that day.

It seems unlikely that Warren was of a mind to continue his rather halfhearted revolt. His spurts of acting out at school had been pretty tame; according to his sister Roberta, “rebellious” was “a pretty strong word” for him.

But Howard and Leila were shocked. Though they were gentle with Warren when he returned to Washington, Howard resolved to nip his mutiny in the bud. He told Warren that he would have to improve his marks or give up his paper route.

This worked on Warren’s grades like a tonic. Far from relinquishing the paper route, he expanded it. He promptly procured a route with the Times-Herald , the Post ’s morning competitor, covering the same territory as he had with the Post . As Buffett would recall, if a subscriber canceled one paper and wanted the other, “there was my shining face the next day.” ⁵ Soon Warren had five delivery routes, and close to five hundred papers to deliver each morning. Leila would arise early to make his breakfast; Warren was out the door by five-twenty to catch the bus down Massachusetts Avenue. On the rare occasion when he was ill, Leila did the route, but she didn’t go near the money. “Collections were everything to him,” she wrote. “You didn’t dare touch the drawer where he kept his money. Every penny had to be there.”

Warren’s crown jewel was the Westchester Apartments, a cluster of red-brick, eight-story high-rises on Cathedral Avenue. He quickly developed an assembly-line approach that was worthy of the young Henry Ford. He would drop off half of the papers for each building on the eighth-floor elevator landing and half on the fourth floor. Then he would run through the building on foot, floor by floor, sliding the papers in front of each apartment. On collection day, he left an envelope at the front desk, sparing him from having to go door-to-door. When the Buffetts returned to Omaha for the summer, Warren entrusted the route to a friend, Walter Diehl, and lectured him on how to handle it. Diehl remembered, “There was this pile of papers sitting in front of you—a mountain . But it only took an hour and a quarter or so. It was a beautiful route. All the buildings were connected underground. You never had to go outside.”

Figuring that he could increase his profits by adding to his product line, Warren peddled magazines at the apartments, too. The trick was to offer subscriptions at just the right time. Some of his customers, Buffett would recall, “left their magazines out on the stairwell. You could tell by tearing off the address label when the expirations were. So I would keep track of when everybody’s subscriptions expired.” ⁶

Though the apartments were considered classy—Warren saw Jacqueline Bouvier in the elevator—he had a problem with deadbeats. In wartime Washington, people were frequently moving in and out, sometimes neglecting to pay him. So Warren made a deal with the elevator girls. They got free papers; Warren got tipped off when anyone was planning to move! ⁷

In short, Warren had turned his paper routes into a business. He was earning $175 a month—what many a young man was earning as a full-time wage—and saving every dime. ⁸ In 1945, when he was still only fourteen, he took $1,200 of his profits and invested it in forty acres of Nebraska farmland.

World War II, of course, was the omnipresent backdrop to Warren’s Washington years. There were bond drives at school and blackout curtains at home. Nevertheless, the war had little direct impact on him. The single exception was in August 1945, when the Buffetts were spending the summer in Omaha. Warren heard the news about Hiroshima and had a lively discussion about the atom bomb with Jerry Moore, his Omaha neighbor. Warren, Moore recalled, was quite concerned. He viewed relativity as he did religion—with unshaking, terrifying logic . “We were talking—I remember it vividly—on my front lawn. He was afraid of the implications of the chain reaction … of the possible devastation of the world.”

Back in Washington, at Woodrow Wilson High, Warren was fitting in a bit better. His paper routes had given him an escape from homesickness, and he began to develop a set of friends. As in Omaha, he got a crew to hunt for golf balls. He also was a pretty good golfer and joined the school team.

Robert Dwyer, the golf coach, was another teacher-figure that Warren cultivated. Dwyer thought him funny—eager without being pushy. He took Warren to the track and taught him how to read the Daily Racing Form . In the summer after Warren’s junior year, Dwyer and Warren happened to be playing golf on the day of the All-Star game. It started to rain, so they went to Dwyer’s car and turned on the game. Charlie Keller, the New York Yankee slugger, was up. Dwyer said, “If you give me twenty-to-one odds, I’ll bet you he hits a home run.” Warren said, “I’ll take a dollar’s worth.” Keller, of course, hit one. Dwyer was kind enough to lose the $20 on another bet.

But as both of them knew, Warren was making more money than his coach. ⁹ Marooned in a strange city, he was trying to jump-start his career at a time when he was barely capable of shaving. He was reading every business book he could get his hands on, poring over actuarial tables, running his paper route. Donald Danly, a Wilson student who became a good friend, thought Warren “was charting his way toward a [financial] target.”

Danly, the son of a Justice Department attorney, was a serious and brilliant student. At first glance, he and Warren had little in common. Danly had a good-looking girlfriend, whereas Warren didn’t date. And Danly was chiefly interested in science. But Danly, who had lost his mother, began to spend a lot of time at the Buffetts’ after the war, when Danly’s father went to Japan to prosecute war criminals. The two played music together, Warren strumming on the ukulele while Danly played the piano. Then they discovered that Danly’s love of science and Warren’s obsession with business had a shared language—numbers. They would calculate the odds of poker hands, or the chances, in a room with a dozen people, that two would have the same birthday. Or Danly would rattle off a series of two-digit numbers, waiting for Warren to spit out the sum.

In their senior year, Danly bought a used pinball machine for $25, and Warren and he played it by the hour. The machine often broke, and as Danly tinkered with it, Warren took note of his friend’s mechanical skill. Warren had an idea: why not put the machine in the barber shop on Wisconsin Avenue and rent it out? ¹⁰

Warren approached the barber, who agreed to a fifty-fifty split. At the end of the first day, they found $14 in the machine. Within a month or so, Warren and Danly had machines in three barbershops. Prospering, they expanded to seven. Warren—living a real-life fantasy—thought of a name, the Wilson Coin Operated Machine Company. “Eventually we were making $50 a week,” he recalled. “I hadn’t dreamed life could be so good.” ¹¹

Wilson Coin Op had a natural division of labor. Warren put up most of the capital for the machines, secondhand arcade games that cost from $25 to $75 apiece. Danly repaired them. Warren kept the books and typed a monthly financial statement. Barbers were instructed to call Danly if a machine broke—one was always breaking—and the two of them would show up pronto in Danly’s 1938 Buick, which had had the backseat removed.

Fearing that the pinball business was controlled by the mob, Warren stuck to small, out-of-the-way locations. Also, he and Danly hinted that they were merely legmen for a going concern that was not to be taken lightly. Buffett recalled:

Once a week they made the rounds, sometimes with Danly’s girlfriend, Norma Jean Thurston. Warren would return to the car with a funny description of the barber, or of what he’d said to him, and the three of them would howl. Warren could see the twist—the irony of these kids acting out the role of being big-time businessmen.

Norma Jean thought Warren was especially funny. She was pretty and slender, with arched eyebrows and striking blond hair. Her nickname was “Peroxide.” Danly was “Duck,” but Warren was simply “Buffett.” Their elders had fought a war, but Buffett, Duck, and Peroxide were still in a state of innocence. Though they were natural hams, they didn’t smoke or use swear words, and Warren didn’t drink anything but Pepsi-Cola. All the girls that Norma Jean knew were virgins; in her crowd there was hardly any sex. But Warren was a shade more innocent still. He didn’t go to the Friday-night dances; “he didn’t have the moves other guys had,” Norma Jean said. “He didn’t try.”

He walked with his shoulders hunched forward and bent toward the ground, tramp , tramp , like a billy goat. At times, he carried a clunky-looking change purse strapped to his belt. ¹³ To his Wilson classmates, Warren’s footwear marked him as a hayseed, and they remembered it after decades. “We used to get a kick out of Warren and his sneakers,” remembered Casper Heindl. “He used to wear ’em year-round. I don’t care if the snow was a foot deep, he had sneakers on.” And Robert Moore said, “I remember him very well. The one thing we used to joke about—he didn’t wear anything other than tennis shoes. Even in the dead of winter.”

Warren seemed to take a perverse delight in those sneakers. “Most of us were trying to be like everyone else,” Norma Jean noted. “The girls all buttoned their sweaters in the back. I think he liked being different.” Though he was high-spirited and perpetually kidding, there was something of the odd man out about him. When his quirks were pointed out, he would stick to his guns, or kid himself, with self-deprecation. Norma Jean said, “He was what he was and he never tried to be anything else.”

At the dinner table at home, Warren was getting a nightly seminar on sticking to one’s guns. Howard, who despite his pledge to serve one term was reelected in 1944 and again in 1946, was in the fabled do-nothing Congress, so named for fighting Truman at every turn. In the evenings, he would expose the family to a drumbeat of dire alarums. Once, when the family was discussing what to get one of Howard’s aides for Christmas, little Roberta piped up, “How about a savings bond—or does he know that they’re no good?”

Another time, after having voted against a popular labor measure, Howard took Warren to a baseball game in Omaha. When the congressman was introduced to the crowd, he was roundly booed. ¹⁴ But he showed Warren no sign that he minded.

Unshakably ethical, Howard refused offers of junkets and even turned down a part of his pay. During his first term, when the congressional salary was raised from $10,000 to $12,500, Howard left the extra money in the Capitol disbursement office, insisting that he had been elected at the lower salary.

Leila said her husband considered only one issue in voting on a measure: “Will this add to, or subtract from, human liberty?” But his view of liberty was decidedly cramped. His single interest was in rolling back the enlarged government that Roosevelt, and World War II, had made permanent.

During the war, he coauthored a letter demanding that the United States “elaborate” on its policy of seeking an unconditional German surrender and posing the curious question “What are we fighting for?” ¹⁵ Did uprooting Nazism not constitute “an addition to human liberty?”

After the war, he voted against aiding bombed-out Britain, against school lunches, against European grain exports, and against the Bretton Woods monetary scheme. ¹⁶ At his worst, his Americanism lapsed into xenophobia and Red-baiting. As the Buffetts drove past the still-lit British embassy in the evenings, Howard would growl, “They even stay up late to think of ways to get our money.” ¹⁷ He opposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe as “Operation Rathole,” and as possibly having Stalin’s secret backing. ¹⁸

On several issues, Howard was remarkably prescient. One of his few proposals was a measure to protect the owners of U.S. savings bonds against inflation. Yet the broad sense of his tenure is that of a moralist disfigured by parochial, and extremist, claims.

Warren mouthed his father’s politics, ¹⁹ and probably believed them superficially, but he didn’t commit himself to them. He absorbed his father’s patriotism, but not his bitter isolationism. A few years later, Warren wryly alluded to his father’s dogmatism in a letter to a college friend. “I had better knock this off,” Warren wrote, “and go out and help my dad conduct a crusade against something or other.” ²⁰

He did inherit his father’s scruples and concern for society. (Indeed, Warren would later revile the corporate theft of other people’s money in much the same terms that Howard critiqued the government’s.) But for Warren, who had witnessed the Depression and the war as a child, government was society’s defender, not its enemy. Given his utter devotion to his father, his political awareness, though still undeveloped, suggested a stirring of independence.

Warren had already decided that he would not follow his father into government. When Norma Jean asked whether he might make a life in Washington, Warren replied without hesitation, “No. I’m going to live in Omaha.”

By his senior year, he was planning on a career not just in business, but specifically in investing. Sitting in the breakfast nook at home, at an age when other boys didn’t get past the sports pages, he was already studying the stock tables. And word of his supposed expertise had followed him to school, where his teachers tried to pick his brain about the market. ²¹

In a wily effort to capitalize on his renown, Warren shorted—that is, bet against—shares of American Telephone & Telegraph Company, because he knew that his teachers owned it. “They thought I knew about stocks and I thought if I shorted AT&T, I would terrorize them about their retirement.” ²²

Why this mild repute as an oracle? Warren hadn’t had any coups in the market. Yet people sensed that he knew. He had something innate: not merely a precocious store of knowledge, but an ability for casting it in logical terms. Faith didn’t move him, but facts he could assemble in a smooth and sensible train. Quoting Danly: “He just seemed to have tremendous insight. He would say things in a way that didn’t leave any doubt that he knew what he was talking about.”

Warren graduated in June 1947, finishing sixteenth in a class of 374. (Danly was tied for first.) The Wilson yearbook captured him with bright, eager eyes, neatly parted hair, and a sheepish grin. The caption: “Likes math … a future stockbroker.”

Howard suggested the nearby Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. Warren replied that college would be a waste. He had delivered almost 600,000 papers and in the process earned over $5,000. ²³ Money was coming in from newspapers, from Wilson Coin Op, and from a Nebraska tenant farmer. What’s more, he had read at least one hundred books on business. What, in short, did he have to learn?

Howard gently pointed out that Warren was still two months shy of his seventeenth birthday. Finally, Warren capitulated. In August, Wilson Coin Op was sold for $1,200 to a returned war veteran. Warren pocketed his share and headed for Wharton.

This time, though, Howard had been wrong. Despite Wharton’s fine reputation, its curriculum was lacking in beef. Warren disgustedly reported that he knew more than the professors. His dissatisfaction—a forerunner of his general disaffection for business schools—was rooted in their mushy, overbroad approach. His professors had fancy theories but were ignorant of the practical details of making a profit that Warren craved.

When Warren visited Omaha, Mary Falk warned him not to neglect his studies. He replied insouciantly, “Mary, all I need to do is open the book the night before and drink a big bottle of Pepsi-Cola and I’ll make 100.”

In fact, he was spending a lot of his time at a brokerage office in Philadelphia, following various stocks. ²⁴ But he didn’t have a system for investing—or if he did, it was haphazard. He would study the charts, he would listen to tips. But he didn’t have a framework. He was searching.

In his freshman year, Warren roomed with Charles Peterson, an Omaha boy (and later, among Warren’s first investors). He also made fast friends with Harry Beja, a Mexican who was as displaced on a northeastern campus as Warren was. Beja was the most serious student on campus, but Warren would kid him about living with the “Indians” in Mexico. The two of them matched A+’s in Industry 1, but Beja couldn’t help but notice how much harder he had worked in the course than Warren had. Nonetheless, though he resented Warren’s easy success, Beja had to admit that he liked Warren. Beja saw him as the type of American he had idealized: the honest and unassuming Midwesterner with a common touch.

Warren found another kindred soul in Beja’s roommate, a Brooklyn boy named Jerry Orans. They met in the weight room, and the broad-shouldered Orans instantly decided that Warren was a “genius.” Like Warren, Orans felt a bit out of the swing; he was dreadfully homesick and spent much of the first year in tears. ²⁵ But he had a rapier wit and a warm smile, and was very bright himself. Warren and Orans became close friends.

Unwittingly, Warren was sowing the seeds for a future pool of investors. ^* But at the time, he felt he was going nowhere. After a year at Penn, he wanted out, but his father insisted that he try another year. In Washington for the summer, Warren found a comical outlet for his rich-man strivings—once again with Don Danly. His pinball partner had plunked down $350 for an old Rolls-Royce. Warren went with Danly to a Baltimore junkyard to pick it up and followed him back to Washington. Just inside the District line, they were stopped by the police. Danly recounted:

Danly kept the Rolls in the Buffetts’ garage. They spent the summer fixing it up—though, of course, Danly was the one who was under the chassis. Warren would sit on a stool, entertaining his friend with business stories and reading from a book they thought was a scream— How to Lose Friends and Alienate People .

The Rolls was a 1928 Ladies’ Shopping Car. It had a single seat in front and a wide berth in back, and a hand crank for show. Danly and Norma Jean painted it dark blue. They rented it out a few times, but the real point was to be seen in it. Warren proposed that they drive downtown, posing as a rich couple with their chauffeur—but he would play the rich “aristocrat,” Danly the chauffeur. Danly put on Howard Buffett’s black overcoat and took the wheel, and Warren, wearing a muskrat coat and top hat, sidled in next to Norma Jean. As they approached the Times-Herald building, Danly, following a script, cut off the ignition and coasted to a stop. Then he got out and started tinkering under the hood, as if he were trying to figure out what was wrong. When people started to stare, Warren—the aristocrat—tapped on the windshield glass with a cane and pointed, as if indicating where the trouble might be. Danly fiddled a bit more and—behold—it was “fixed.” ^†

But without a script, Warren was hardly so suave. He dated Norma Jean’s cousin, Barbara Worley, over the summer, and took her to hear Billie Holiday. But though Warren was a lively companion, he ruined any hope of romance by subjecting Worley to an unending series of riddles and “brainteasers”—presumably, an activity that relieved Warren’s awkwardness. When he finally screwed up his courage and invited her for a weekend at Penn, Worley turned him down.

In his sophomore year, Warren lived at the Alpha Sigma Phi house, a Victorian mansion on Spruce Street with high ceilings and a stately spiral stair. He was ambivalent toward his fraternity brothers—not aloof, but not quite part of their rituals, either. After lunch, he would plop himself in a curved bridge chair by a bay window and join in a game of hearts or bridge. In a conversational setting, such as at mealtimes, Warren was very alive—loose and confident with his opinions. In those years, fraternity members were served by waiters and dressed in jackets and ties for dinner. Anthony Vecchione, recalling Warren’s table chatter, said, “When he was on he was fun—a lot of laughs.”

But Warren was aching for some sort of intellectual—or financial-stimulus. Penn was a rah-rah school; campus life in 1948 revolved around pep rallies and the top-ten football team. Ironically, Warren was portrayed on the cover of Penn Pics , a student magazine, as the model fan, decked in a derby hat and raccoon coat, one hand waving a banner, the other offering a brandy flask to his apparent date, with a cigar extending from a jaunty grin, all against a photographic montage depicting the Penn marching band and a leather-helmeted ball carrier.

The cover was a joke; Warren’s friend Jerry Orans was one of the editors. In truth, Warren was everything that the cover boy was not. He was a nondrinker, was uncomfortable with women, and was not a big socializer. On a campus with so many older students—returned GIs—he even looked out of place. With his hair unslicked, the skinny eighteen-year-old student looked like a visiting kid brother.

His youthfulness was especially apparent in the context of sex. Besides being inexperienced with women, he was noticeably ill-at-ease with the fellows’ locker-room humor. “I remember distinctly,” said Vecchione, the son of a Long Island subcontractor, “when people started talking about sex, he’d look at the floor. His face would get flushed.”

On weekends, when Alpha Sigma threw beer parties, the monastic frat house was flooded with women. Warren usually did not have a date, but—of importance for a future investor—he was comfortable without being part of the crowd. While most of the guys had their arms around a date, Warren would sit on the couch and entertain the party with a little dissertation on the gold standard. He was so captivating that the fellows made a party routine of having Warren stand in a corner and peppering him with questions about economics and politics. “He’d start holding forth, and before a minute or two had gone by he’d have an audience, maybe ten to twenty people,” remembered William Wayne Jones, a fellow nondrinker and a future Methodist missionary. “He would do it so humbly you were just in thrall. He’d say, ‘I really don’t know much about this, but it looks to me …’ ”

Warren’s fraternity mates were in awe of his intellect. ²⁶ He would read a chapter, they recalled, and recite it by rote. In class, when a graduate lecturer would parrot an answer from the text, Warren, who had it memorized, would burst out, “You forgot the comma.” ²⁷ Moreover, the way he glibly critiqued the faculty left his fellows spellbound. One of the frat brothers, Richard Kendall, said, “Warren came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything Wharton could teach him. And he was right.”

When the brothers returned to Wharton in the fall of 1949, they were stunned to find that Warren wasn’t there. Vecchione said, “He just evaporated at the end of the second year. Nobody ever heard from him again.” ²⁸ In short, he had run away once more. His father had been defeated in 1948 and had returned with the family to Omaha, leaving Warren alone in the East. In Wharton, there had been nothing to keep him—no paper route, no pinball. He transferred to the familiar University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where his parents had met. “I didn’t feel I was learning that much,” Warren explained. “Nebraska called, Wharton repelled.” ²⁹

Among his Alpha Sigma brothers, the memory that stuck was of Warren’s playing bridge, in an alcove by the great bay window. Otherwise, he almost seemed not to have been there.

From the time he returned to Nebraska, Buffett was a student only in name. In fact, he was launching his career. During the summer, he took a job at J.C. Penney, where he was offered (but declined) a position for after college. Feeling more comfortable on his home turf, he also began to date more. Writing to “Dear Monster” (Jerry Orans), a jocular Buffett was feeling his oats:

He planned a Herculean load—five courses in the fall of 1949 and six in the spring of 1950, mostly in business and economics. But his focus was off-campus. Buffett had taken a newspaper job, he explained to Orans, that involved “50 little boys calling me ‘Mr. Buffett.’ ” He was supervising paperboys in six rural counties for the Lincoln Journal , traveling southeastern Nebraska in a 1941 Ford. The job paid seventy-five cents an hour. Mark Seacrest, the head of circulation, was dubious that a student could handle the load. But Buffett was “all charged up.” He would come in each week to get his assignments and be off in a flash. To Buffett, it was a man-sized job. In his words:

In Lincoln, Buffett lived with Truman Wood, then affianced to Warren’s sister Doris, in the upstairs of a Victorian house on Pepper Avenue. Buffett would come back from his newspaper work in the late afternoon, read the Wall Street Journal , and go out with Wood to a greasy spoon for a dinner such as mashed potatoes, beef, and gravy. Wood, intrigued that Buffett had read the Bible three or four times and remained agnostic, could not resist trying to convert him. They had the usual debates about faith and the afterlife, but Buffett was immovable. For every argument that Wood raised, Buffett had a deadly logical response.

Apart from their bull sessions, Buffett was rushing to finish college in three years, working a virtually full-time job, keeping up his bridge game, and racking up A’s. Also, as he wrote to Orans in the fall, he had submitted a dozen entries in the hopes of winning a $100 Burma-Shave jingle contest, ^‡ and had lined up a date with “a German gal that looks all right.”

In the winter, Buffett revived his golf-ball business—this time as a serious enterprise, with Orans as his agent in Philadelphia. In January 1950, Buffett implored his friend to get down to business.

Buffett promised to make good the losses on any “duds” and assured Orans that the quality of his golf balls was okay. Nonetheless, he added, “don’t get them near any real heat.” As an afterthought, Buffett mentioned that he had gotten through finals “pretty good” and listed his courses for the spring. In April, having sent Orans a shipment, he sent his chum a lighthearted—but pointed—reminder that “Buffett’s Golf Enterprises” was not a charitable venture.

In the summer, Buffett continued his breakneck pace, moving in with his parents and taking three courses in Omaha so he could get the credits to graduate. By July, he had sold 220 dozen golf balls and had reaped $1,200 from them. ³⁴ From all his ventures combined, he had saved $9,800.

That trifling grubstake would be the source of every dollar that Buffett would earn. ³⁵ He had tracked every penny—the Cities Service stock, the paper route, the golf-ball sales, the pinball—in squiggly, uneven handwriting. So prophetic was his ledger of later exploits that it called to the mind of one journalist the papers that “Horatio Alger might have donated to the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School.” ³⁶

Buffett had in fact applied to Harvard Business School. He confidently wrote to Orans, who had opted for Columbia Law School: “Egad! Big Jerry, reconsider and join me at Harvard.” ³⁷ In the summer, Buffett took a train to Chicago to meet an alumnus. Scrawny and unpolished, and merely nineteen, he struck his interviewer as not quite Harvard. The session was over in ten minutes. ³⁸ Writing “Big Jerry” on July 19, Buffett needed five paragraphs to work up to the news. He informed his friend that he was taking a tax course and learning “all the shrewd angles that clip the dollars from the return.” There followed talk of his “famous cannonball serve,” get-well wishes for Orans’s convalescing father, and an update on golf-ball sales.

Two weeks later, there was no holding back. “Dear Big Jerry,” he wrote.

Buffett was being a bit too nonchalant. Benjamin Graham, in fact, was the dean of the securities profession; he and his colleague David Dodd had written the seminal textbook in the field, Security Analysis . And Buffett had read Graham’s new book, The Intelligent Investor , while at Lincoln, and had found it highly captivating. Wood, Buffett’s housemate, said, “It was almost like he had found a god.” ⁴⁰ His jocular reference to Columbia’s “hot shots” may be taken as posturing at a moment when he feared being rejected again. But in August, Buffett got some good news. He was going to New York, to study with the master.