The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [126]
Willa Johnson, a large, capable black housekeeper who quietly became Susie’s extra set of hands, eyes, and ears, joined the household, freeing Susie to find an outlet for her creativity. She and a friend, Thama Friedman, decided to set up a contemporary art gallery. As with everything involving money, the decision had to be cleared with Warren. Before forking over Susie’s share, he “interviewed” them in his sitting room and asked, “Do you expect to make money?” Friedman answered, “No,” whereupon Buffett replied, “Okay, Susie can come in as an ‘investor.’”51 He liked the idea of her doing something of her own and, according to Friedman, wanted them to step back and think about the gallery in a businesslike way while being realistic that it was a hobby. Warren always thought of money in terms of the return on capital laid out, and since the gallery wasn’t going to make a profit, he wanted them to limit their spending. Susie’s involvement in the gallery was truly a hobby, says Friedman, who managed it day to day.
Susie was considered a flexible, easygoing, but attentive mother by her friends and relatives. Now that the Buffetts lived closer to both their parents, the children spent more time with their grandparents. The atmosphere at the Thompsons’, a block and a half away, was relaxed and enjoyable; they didn’t care if Howie broke a window or the kids made a mess. Dorothy Thompson got into the spirit of things, playing games, organizing Easter egg hunts, and making elaborate multilayered ice-cream cones. The children loved Doc Thompson, despite his sober self-importance and the way he pontificated. Once he sat Howie on his knee. “Don’t drink alcohol,” he said, over and over. “It will kill your brain cells, and you don’t have any to waste.”52
On Sundays, Doc Thompson sometimes came over and preached in a jelly-bean-colored suit right in Warren and Susie’s living room. Otherwise, Howie and Susie Jr. went to the Buffetts’, where Leila towed them off to church. Compared to the Thompsons, she and Howard seemed stiff and straitlaced. Howard remained such a Victorian throwback that when he called Doris and Warren with news about their sister Bertie, he could only choke out, “All hell’s broken loose!” They finally managed to discover, from someone else, that she had lost her baby. Howard couldn’t bring himself to say the word “miscarriage.”
With their large new house, Warren and Susie began to play host for the families. At her first family Thanksgiving dinner, Susie prepared the turkey herself, thinking the easy way would be to cook it overnight at 100 degrees. After the turkey fell apart, she called on Mrs. Hegman, a cook inherited from Leila, to come and help. Someone other than Warren had to carve, however, since he was useless with a knife. And at family gatherings when his mother was present, as soon as he could get away with it, he disappeared upstairs to work.
Susie had covered Warren’s new little office off the master bedroom with greenback-patterned wallpaper. Comfortably surrounded by money, he now set about buying cheap stocks as fast as his fingers could fly through the Moody’s Manuals: businesses that sold basic items or commodities that could be easily valued, like Davenport Hosiery, Meadow River Coal & Land, Westpan Hydrocarbon, and Maracaibo Oil Exploration. For the partnership, for himself, for Susie, or for all of these whenever he had money, he put it to work as fast as he could bring it through the door.
Often he needed secrecy to execute his ideas and he used intelligent, willing people like Dan Monen to act as his proxies. Another of these proxies was Daniel Cowin, a value hunter who worked for the small brokerage firm Hettleman & Co. in New York. Warren had met Dan through their late friend from Columbia, Fred Kuhlken.53 Hettleman made investments in little stocks with capitalizations of a few million,