The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [118]
Despite his brilliance, Warren was still very immature. For Susie, his helplessness at home meant that he was like having a third child to care for. His personality and interests also shaped their social life. In Omaha, a midsize Midwestern city with relatively few important cultural institutions, weekends were filled with weddings, parties, teas, and charity events. The Buffetts lived a much quieter life than most young married couples of their class and era. Although Susie began to climb the ladder of the Junior League and they joined a “gourmet group”—where Warren politely asked each month’s hostess to make him a hamburger—they socialized with friends less in crowds than in ones and twos. Most of their social life took place at dinner with other couples, in small groups, or at occasional dinner parties where Warren could talk about stocks. It was always the same: Warren entertained, either holding forth to an audience on stocks or playing the ukulele. Under Susie’s tutelage, he could now exchange remarks about other subjects more easily than before, but his mind remained fixated on making money. During meals and parties at home, he often fled small talk by leaving the table to go upstairs. But unlike Ben Graham, he was not upstairs reading Proust; he was working. As for Susie, she knew little and cared less about what Warren did. “I used to write ‘security analyst’ for his job, and people thought he checked burglar alarms,” she said.14
All Warren’s recreations remained repetitive, competitive, or, better yet, both. He found playing bridge with Susie unendurable because she wanted the other side to win, and soon sought other partners.15 His mind was like a restless monkey; to relax, he needed an active form of concentration that could keep the monkey occupied. Ping-Pong, bridge, poker, golf all absorbed him and took his mind off money temporarily. But he never hosted backyard barbecues, lazed around a swimming pool, stargazed, or simply went for a walk in the woods. A stargazing Warren would have looked at the Big Dipper and seen a dollar sign.
All of this, plus his nonconformist streak, meant that Warren was not a “joiner,” sitting through committee and board meetings. Still, family loyalty did lead him to say yes when his uncle Fred Buffett came over to the house and asked him to join the Rotary Club. He was fond of Fred, proprietor of the Buffett grocery; he and Fred went bowling at the Rotary (repetitive, competitive)—and besides, his grandfather had been president of the Rotary.
On the other hand, when asked to join the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, a more important group of civic leaders that combined philanthropy, business, boosterism, and social activities, he said no. For a budding money manager who needed to raise funds for his business, that was like thumbing his nose in the faces of the men who ran Omaha—an act of cocky self-assurance, even arrogance, which set him apart from much of his social set. His sister Doris had made her debut as a Princess of Ak-Sar-Ben. The sister of his brother-in-law and former roommate, Truman Wood, had been Queen of Ak-Sar-Ben. Friends like Chuck Peterson were regulars on its social circuit. As a Congressman, Howard had been obligated to join. But Warren found social hierarchy repugnant and he disdained the smoke-filled backroom clubbiness and conformity of the Ak-Sar-Ben crowd. These were the people who had looked down on his father