The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [125]
With momentum behind him, Warren realized it was time to leave a house where there was barely room for a family with two young children—one an unusually energetic three-and-a-half-year-old—and a third on the way. The Buffetts bought their first house. It stood on Farnam Street, a Dutch Cape set back on a large corner lot overlooked by evergreens, next to one of Omaha’s busiest thoroughfares. While the largest house on the block, it had an unpretentious and charming air, with dormers set into the sloping shingled roof and an eyebrow window.42 Warren paid $31,500 to Sam Reynolds, a local businessman, and promptly named it “Buffett’s Folly.”43 In his mind $31,500 was a million dollars after compounding for a dozen years or so, because he could invest it at such an impressive rate of return. Thus, he felt as though he were spending an outrageous million dollars on the house.
Just before the moving van left the house on Underwood Avenue, Warren took five-year-old Little Susie back up the stairs to the wrought-iron balcony. “The glasses man is staying here,” he said. “You need to say good-bye to him.” Susie Jr. said good-bye, and, indeed, the glasses man remained behind.44
Big Susie’s job was to oversee the move, get them settled into the house, and lasso Howie while more than eight months pregnant with her third child. As longtime friends observed, Howie was a “hell-raiser.” The inexhaustible Buffett energy poured from him in such a whirlwind that he was nicknamed the Tornado, a cousin to Warren’s childhood nickname, Firebolt—but with a very different connotation. As soon as Howie could walk, says Buffett, he became peripatetic. He dug up the garden with his Tonka toys, and Susie took them away, then he tore the house apart to find them. Once he did, he dug the garden up again. Susie snatched away the front-loader, and the battle repeated itself.45
A week after arriving at Farnam Street and just a day before the Mo-Buff partnership was born, the Buffetts’ second son, Peter, arrived. From the start he was a quiet, easy baby. But shortly after his birth, Susie came down with a kidney infection.46 Since her rheumatic fever and ear infections as a child, she had always considered herself healthy. The kidney infection did not concern her as much as shielding Warren from dealing with it; his discomfort around illness was so great that she had trained the family to pay attention to him whenever somebody got sick, as if he, too, were ill and required care. Her real focus was on having a home of her own at last. Even illness and the demands of caring for a new baby and two small children could not suppress her urge to decorate. As it sprang to life, she redid the house in cheery contemporary style, with chrome-and-leather furniture and huge, bright modern paintings covering the white walls. The $15,000 decorating bill totaled almost half of what the house itself had cost, which “just about killed Warren,” according to Bob Billig, a golfing pal.47 He didn’t notice colors or respond to visual aesthetics and so was indifferent to the result, seeing only the outrageous bill.
“Do I really want to spend $300,000 for this haircut?” was his attitude. If Susie wanted to spend some trifling sum of money, he would say, “I’m not sure I want to blow $500,000 that way.”48 But since Susie wanted to spend money that he wanted to withhold, and since he wanted Susie to be happy and she wanted to please him, their personalities were gradually meshing into a system of bargaining and trades.
The outrageous bill included the cost of a device that became an object of wonderment among their friends and neighbors—one of the first color television sets in Omaha.49 Susie