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“Fred had written and described Dan as a young star on Wall Street and said we were made for each other. I immediately decided that Fred was one hundred percent right on both counts. In the next few years, Dan and I were constantly together whenever I visited New York.”54

Cowin was nine years older, with deep-set eyes and a penetrating gaze. When the two of them were together, it seemed, on the surface, like a grown man hobnobbing with a college boy, but they had much in common. Cowin had grown up poor during the Depression after his father lost the family’s money, and as a teenager he had supported his family. He put the money he got for a thirteenth-birthday gift into stocks.55 He gravitated toward a career in investing after his Navy service, working independently even at an investment house, keeping his ideas to himself. Unlike Buffett, however, he had a strong appreciation for cutting-edge art, was creative around the house—spraying pinecones silver for the Christmas dinner table—and collected photography and antiques. What attracted Buffett to him was that Cowin traded well and worked his own ideas.56 Cowin had also endeared himself to Warren early on, when he was at Graham-Newman, by lending him $50,000 for a week so that Warren could buy some mutual-fund shares to achieve a thousand-dollar tax saving.57 Over time, they collaborated, with Dan the balding senior partner: more experienced and with more money to invest, but sharing information and ideas.

Buffett and Cowin used to call each other weekly when the Pink Sheets that listed small stocks came out, and compare notes. “Did you get that one?” “Yes! I bought that, that’s mine!”—both feeling like winners when they had picked the same ones. “It was like picking a horse,” says Dan’s wife, Joyce.58 They thought about taking over the National Casket Company, code-naming it the Container Company. “Dan was a digger,” Buffett says, “which I guess makes sense.”

Once, Buffett says, they had even tried to buy a Maryland “town” that the Federal Housing Authority was auctioning off for peanuts: it consisted of the post office, the town hall, and a large number of rental properties that were charging below-market rents. The town had been built during the Depression. Buffett recalls that the ad for the town made them salivate with Snidely Whiplash dreams of quickly raising the rents to a market rate. But even for “peanuts,” the town was expensive and they couldn’t get together enough cash.59

Warren could never get enough cash. He was always trying to raise money. The Graham connection was about to pay off again. Bernie Sarnat—a pioneer in plastic and reconstructive surgery—went to have a chat one day with Ben Graham, his wife’s first cousin. Ben had moved across the street from the Sarnats when he and Estey retired to California. Sarnat says he asked Graham what he should do with his money now, “what little money he had in his partnership. Well,” recalls Sarnat, “he said, ‘Oh, buy AT&T,’ and he handed me shares in three closed-end funds and some stock. And then he very casually mentioned, ‘One of my former students is doing some investing. Warren Buffett.’ And that was it. So casually that I didn’t even pick it up.”

Hardly anybody knew Warren Buffett. He might as well have been a patch of moss hidden under a rock in Omaha. Sarnat’s wife, Rhoda, a social worker, took a walk every day with her cousin-in-law Estey. “One day not long after,” she recalls, “Estey said to me, ‘Listen, Rhoda, people are always approaching us to invest in their partnerships, because if they can tell people that Ben Graham invests in them, they have it made. We say no to everybody. But that Warren Buffett—he has potential. We’re investing with him, and you’d better do it too.’

“My only question was,” says Rhoda, “‘Estey, I know you think he’s bright, but I’m more interested in whether he’s honest.’ Estey said, ‘Absolutely. Totally. I trust him a hundred percent.’” The Sarnats and Estey Graham put $10,000 and $15,000, respectively, into Mo-Buff.