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By Root 3083 0

judge, had brought the family to prominence, welcome in every drawing room in Omaha—rather than only at the back door, delivering groceries, like the Buffetts. Judge Munger, an iron disciplinarian, had forced the whole family to read Robinson Crusoe to absorb the book’s portrayal of the conquest of nature through discipline. He was known for giving longer jury instructions than any judge in the middle west.3 He liked to lecture his relatives on the virtue of saving and the vices of gambling and saloons. Charlie’s straitlaced aunt Ufie, who listened, had “kept hard at two separate careers until past eighty, dominated her church, saved her money, and, duty-ridden, attended as a matter of course her beloved husband’s autopsy.”4

Judge Munger’s son Al followed his father into the law, becoming a respectable but not rich attorney who counted among his clients the Omaha World-Herald and other important local institutions. Lighthearted, unlike his father, he was often seen enjoying a pipe, hunting, or catching a fish. His son later said of him that Al Munger “achieved exactly what he wished to achieve, no more or less…with less fuss than either his father or his son, each of whom spent considerable time foreseeing troubles that never happened.”5

Al’s wife, the beautiful, witty Florence “Toody” Russell, came from another clan raised on duty and moral rectitude, an enterprising family of New England intellectuals known for what Charlie referred to as “plenty of plain living and high thinking.” When she announced she was marrying Al Munger, her elderly grandmother observed his thick spectacles and five-foot, five-and-a-half-inch frame and was flabbergasted. “Whoever would have thought she had the sense?” she supposedly exclaimed.

Al and Toody Munger had three children: Charles, Carol, and Mary. A photograph of Charlie as an infant shows him already wearing the petulant expression so typical of him later in life. At Dundee Elementary School, his most prominent features were a pair of huge elfin ears and, when he chose to reveal it, a broad smile. He was recognized as intelligent, “lively,” and “too independent-minded to bow down to meet certain teachers’ expectations,” according to his sister Carol Estabrook.6 “Smart, and a smarty,” is how the Mungers’ neighbor Dorothy Davis recalls Charlie from his earliest childhood.7 Mrs. Davis tried to control Charlie’s influence on her son, Neal, but nothing tamed Charlie’s mouth, not even the sight of her with a switch in her hand, coming after the boys to lash their bare calves.

Warren had borne the indignities of childhood with only brief rebellion before learning to hide his misery and adopt artful strategies to cope. Too proud to submit, Charlie suffered through the woes of youth by employing his talent for wounding sarcasm. Matched as a dance partner every single Friday at Addie Fogg’s dance class with Mary McArthur, the only girl shorter than he, Charlie made no secret of his irritation at the routine that emphasized his status as the second-shortest child in the class.8 At Central High School, he gained the nickname “Brains” and a reputation for hyperactiveness—and for being aloof.9

From a family that treasured learning, he grew up intellectually ambitious and enrolled in the University of Michigan at seventeen, majoring in mathematics. He enlisted in the Army a year after Pearl Harbor, halfway through his sophomore year. While in the service he attended the University of New Mexico and California Institute of Technology for credits in meteorology, though he never actually graduated. After more coursework he worked in Nome, Alaska, as an Army meteorologist. Later, Munger would make a point of saying that he never saw active duty and would emphasize his luck in having been stationed out of harm’s way. The main risk that he took was financial: He augmented his army pay by playing poker. He found he was good at it. It turned out to be his version of the racetrack. He said he learned to fold fast when odds were bad and bet heavily when they were good, lessons he would use to advantage