The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [112]
“I got fifty bucks a share, and I still owned stock in the place. And there was still value in it. The bus companies hid assets in these so-called special reserves and land and buildings and car barns where they kept the old streetcars. And I’ll never know whether my trip up there precipitated that or not.” The conflict-wary Buffett by now had honed to a fine edge the skill of getting his way without asking for it out loud. Thus, while he thought he might have influenced Duff, he could not be certain what had prompted Duff’s decision. What mattered to him was that he got the result he wanted without a fight. He had made about $20,000 on this trade. Who knew there was so much money in buses?15
Nobody in the history of the Buffett family had ever made $20,000 on one idea. In 1955, that was several times more than the average person earned for a whole year’s work. Doubling your money and then some for a few weeks’ work was spectacular. And yet, what was more important to him was doing it without taking any significant risk.
Susie and Warren did not talk about the details of cocoa-bean arbitrage and bus-company stocks. She wasn’t interested in money, except as something to be spent. And what she knew was that even though waves of money were rolling in to the little apartment in White Plains, Warren gave her only a small household allowance. She hadn’t grown up keeping track of every tiny expense, so being married to a man who saved money by making deals with newsstands to buy week-old magazines meant a whole new way of life. She did her best to manage the household herself, but the disparity between what Warren was making and what he gave his wife had become stunning. One day she telephoned her neighbor Madeline O’Sullivan in a panic.
“Madeline, something terrible has happened,” she said. “You’ve got to come down here!” Madeline rushed down to the Buffett apartment and found Susie distraught. She had accidentally thrown a batch of dividend checks that had been sitting on Warren’s desk into the apartment’s incinerator chute, which led straight down to the building’s furnace.16
“Maybe the incinerator isn’t running,” Madeline said, so they called the building superintendent, who let them into the basement. Sure enough, the incinerator was cold. They rooted through the garbage looking for the checks, with Susie all the while wringing her hands and saying, “I can’t face Warren.” When they found the checks, Madeline’s eyes grew wide. They were for as much as thousands of dollars, not $25 or $10 as she had assumed.17 The Buffetts, living in the little apartment in White Plains, were getting truly rich.
As Howie screamed and their money grew, Warren became slightly more accommodating with the checkbook. Despite his thriftiness, he was so enthralled with Susie that he ultimately gave her what she wanted. That June, they returned to Omaha for his sister Bertie’s wedding to Charlie Snorf. By then, Warren had agreed that Susie could have some help with homemaking. So while they were in Omaha they started searching in a hurry for an au pair to return to White Plains with them.
By advertising in the newspaper, they hired a young woman from a small town who “seemed a very proper type”—but wasn’t. Warren threw her on a bus back to Omaha; Susie looked for a replacement, because she needed the help—raising Howie was more than a two-person job—and she knew they could afford it.
Warren’s brilliant performance at Graham-Newman had made him the golden boy of the firm. Ben Graham took a personal interest in Warren, and in his warmly outgoing and beleaguered wife. Graham had given them a movie camera and projector as a baby gift when Howie was born, and even showed up at their apartment with a teddy bear for the little boy.18 On one or two occasions when he and his wife, Estey, had the Buffetts over for dinner, he noticed that