The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [108]
Warren mounted a crusade. He wanted more than his $17 back; he wanted to right an injustice, to bring the reprobate Parents magazine to its knees. He went around the apartment building and found a number of others willing to join the cause. He sued the magazine in small-claims court in Manhattan and looked forward to testifying on behalf of all the allegedly swindled subscribers of Parents magazine. He clicked his heels with glee at the thought of the magazine’s lawyers running their meter. There was a bit of his father in this episode, but with a pecuniary slant and better odds of winning, so that his mother would have approved.
But to his chagrin, before the trial took place he got a check in the mail. Parents magazine had settled. The crusade was foiled.
On December 15, 1954, Warren had come home from work because Susie’s labor was beginning, and then came a ring at the door. Susie answered it and found a door-to-door missionary who had come to call. She politely invited him to sit down in the living room. And she listened.
So did Warren, who was thinking to himself that only Susie would have let the man inside. Warren began to encourage the conversation to wind down. Agnostic for a number of years, he had no interest in being converted, and his wife was in labor. They needed to get to the hospital.
Susie continued listening. “Tell me more,” she said. Now and then she pulsed and moaned slightly as the missionary kept talking.29 She ignored Warren’s signals, obviously feeling it more important to be polite to the visitor and make him feel understood than to get to the hospital. The caller seemed oblivious to the fact that she was in labor. Warren sat there, helpless and increasingly agitated, until the preacher ran out of steam. “I wanted to kill the guy,” he says. But they made it to the hospital in ample time, and Howard Graham Buffett arrived early the next morning.
21
The Side to Play
New York City • 1954–1956
Howie was a “difficult” baby. Whereas Little Sooz had been quiet and placid, Howie was like an alarm clock you couldn’t turn off. His parents kept waiting for the clamor to lessen, but it only increased. The apartment suddenly seemed full and noisy all the time.
“He had some kind of digestive problem. We experimented with all these different kinds of milk bottles. I don’t know whether he was getting air in or not, but he was up all the time. Compared to Little Sooz, Howie was a trial.”
It was Big Susie who jumped to the sound of the alarm clock. Since Warren had grown up between a speechifying father and a mother who alternated grotesque rages with pitter-patter chatter, perhaps it was not surprising that he had learned to shut his ears to what was going on around him. Not even Howie’s howling nights distracted him much. In his little office in the apartment’s third bedroom, he could lose himself for hours in his thoughts.
At work he had become absorbed in a complicated new project that would become a seminal event in his career. Shortly after Warren joined Graham-Newman, the price of cocoa suddenly spiked from a nickel to more than fifty cents a pound. Over in Brooklyn, Rockwood & Co., a chocolate maker “of limited profitability,”1 faced a dilemma. Its number one product was Rockwood chocolate bits, the kind of nuggets used in chocolate chip cookies, and the company couldn’t raise its prices much on this grocery item, so it began running a huge loss. However, with cocoa-bean prices so high, Rockwood also had a chance to unload the cocoa beans it already owned to reap a windfall profit. Unfortunately, the ensuing tax bill would eat up more than half those profits.2
Rockwood’s owners approached Graham-Newman