The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [117]
Indeed, for a college graduate to become self-employed, to work at home, to work alone, was strikingly unusual in the 1950s. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was the guy who got ahead.12 Businessmen joined a big organization—the bigger the better—then competed with polished ferocity for the best-paying job on the steady climb up the ladder of success, trying not to break a sweat or a golf club along the way. They competed to amass not riches but power—or at the very least to buy the right kind of house in a good suburban neighborhood, to get a new-model car every year, and to pave the way for a lifetime of security.
In his choice of occupation, therefore, Warren was as rare as a Buffett who voted for Democrats. Well aware of her husband’s unusual qualities—if not of the apparent riskiness of the course he was charting—Susie arranged for the movers to come, said good-bye to the neighbors, sent out the change-of-address cards, had the telephone service turned off, and packed up their belongings. She flew to Omaha with Little Susie and Howie and moved them all into the house Warren had rented from Chuck Peterson on Underwood Avenue. He had chosen an inviting gray two-story Tudor with picturesque half-beams, a big stone chimney, and a cathedral ceiling. Even the decision to rent a home had been unconventional; owning a home was the quintessence of what most young Americans aspired to in the mid-1950s. The hopelessness of the Depression and the dreary wartime days of making do were fading into memory. Americans stocked their new houses with all the exciting new features and appliances that were suddenly available: washer-dryers, freezers, dishwashers, electric mixers. The Buffetts had plenty of money to buy all these things. But Warren had other plans for his capital, so they rented. And the house they were renting, while attractive, was just barely big enough for them. Howie at almost two would have to sleep in a largish closet.
As Susie began to settle her family in Omaha, Warren closed out his own affairs in New York. He packed up his own desk and files, and sent out his own notices to the companies whose stocks he owned to ensure that the dividend checks followed him to Omaha. Then he got in his car and started driving back to Nebraska, visiting companies along the way.
“I did this zigzag across the country. I just thought it was a great time to hit these companies. I drove through Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and visited the Jeddo-Highland Coal Company. I went through Kalamazoo, and saw the Kalamazoo Stove and Furnace Company. This little odyssey went through Delaware, Ohio, and I visited Greif Bros. Cooperage. That was a company selling at a ridiculously cheap price”—a company he had first discovered in 1951 by flipping through the Moody’s Manuals. He and his father had each bought two hundred shares and put them in their little partnership.
Warren arrived in Omaha toward the end of the summer and found that he was needed at home. Little Sooz, calm and timid, sat watching while her brother’s inexhaustible demands vacuumed up her mother’s energies.13 But in the evenings she wanted her father; she was now afraid to go to bed. When they arrived at the house on Underwood, a moving-company man wearing glasses had spoken to her, and though she did not remember his saying anything untoward, she had frozen in terror and was now convinced that the “glasses man” lurked just outside her bedroom, next to a wrought-iron balcony that overlooked the living room. Warren had to inspect the balcony every night and reassure her that it was safe to go to sleep.
After he had taken care of the “glasses man,” he went down the hall to the tiny sunporch off his and Susie’s bedroom and got down to business, either partnership work or preparing his lessons—for the first thing he had done when he returned to Omaha, besides forming a partnership, was to take on two classes