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Some of the students in Warren’s investing classes had also joined the partnerships, as had Wally Keenan, his former Dale Carnegie instructor. In fact, by 1959, he was getting somewhat of a name around town, in part through his teaching. No longer hidden, his qualities—good and bad—had begun to be recognized in Omaha. The side of him that had taken the counterposition in the teenage radio show American School of the Air came across in Omaha as brash, a know-it-all. “I used to love to take the opposite side of any argument,” he says, “no matter what. I could turn in a second.” People thought it was nervy of him to ask for money to invest without telling them what he would be buying. “There were people in Omaha who thought what I was doing was some sort of Ponzi scheme,” he recalls. It had repercussions. When Warren had reapplied for full membership in the Omaha Country Club, he was blackballed. To be blackballed from the country club was a serious matter; someone disliked him enough to show it in a tangible and embarrassing way. It was one thing to identify with outsiders, but he also wanted to belong. Besides, Warren liked to play golf, and the club had a good course. Through connections, he worked at it until he got off the blacklist.

But his talents shone through to many more people now, and brought him partners of increasing prominence. In February 1959, Casper Offutt and his son, Cap Jr., members of one of Omaha’s most prominent families, approached him about a partnership of their own. When Warren explained that they would not know what he was buying, Cap Sr. said, “Well, I’m not going to put any money in if I don’t know what it is, if you’ve got complete control and I don’t have any voice in it.”60 But Cap Jr., together with his brother John and William Glenn, a businessman for whom Chuck Peterson managed real estate properties, invested anyway. They put $50,000 into Glenoff, the seventh partnership.

And all the while that Warren was investing during these early years of the partnerships, he never deviated from the principles of Ben Graham. Everything he bought was extraordinarily cheap, cigar butts all, soggy stogies containing one free puff. But that was before he met Charlie Munger.

23

The Omaha Club

Omaha • 1959

Like a steel bank vault door, the arched portals of the Omaha Club swung closed behind the bankers and insurance men and railroad executives of the city as George, the black doorman, welcomed them inside. Come from playing squash in the basement or from their offices downtown, the men loitered by the tiled fireplace in the front hall, chatting until the women entered through a separate side door in the building’s Italian Renaissance facade to join them. The assembled parties ascended the curving mahogany staircase to the second floor, passing on the way the life-size painting of a Scotsman catching a trout in a stream. The Omaha Club was where the town came to dance, to raise money, to get married, and to celebrate anniversaries. But above all, it was where the town came to do business, for at its tables you were left to talk in peace.

One summer Friday in 1959, Buffett strode through the club’s entrance to have lunch with two of his partners, Neal Davis and his brother-in-law Lee Seeman, who had arranged for him to meet Davis’s best friend since childhood. It was Neal’s father, Dr. Eddie Davis, who had said to Warren, “You remind me of Charlie Munger” when the Davises had joined the partnership. Now Munger was in town to settle his father’s estate.1

Munger knew only a few facts about the crew-cut Buffett kid, six years his junior. But, consistent with his expectations of life in general, his expectations of this meeting were not high.2 He had developed the habit of expecting little so as never to be disappointed. And rarely did Charles T. Munger meet anyone to whom he enjoyed listening as much as himself.

The Mungers had started in poverty, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century, T. C. Munger, Charlie’s grandfather, a federal