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By Root 3065 0

that required time and planning to execute—even more so than buying up the shares of National American insurance. These projects would sometimes evolve into complicated, even dramatic episodes that would absorb his attention for months, or occasionally years, at a stretch. Sometimes several of these investing projects operated simultaneously. Already preoccupied to the point that he was barely present to his family much of the time, this expansion of scale would exacerbate that tendency, while binding him more tightly to his friends.

The first of these complicated episodes involved a company called Sanborn Map. It published minutely detailed maps of power lines, water mains, driveways, building engineering, roof composition, and emergency stairwells for all the cities of the United States, maps that were mainly bought by insurance companies.2 The business was no winner, its customer base slowly shrinking as insurers merged. But its stock was cheap at $45 per share, since Sanborn’s investment portfolio alone was worth $65 per share. To get hold of that investment portfolio, however, Warren needed not just money from his partnerships but also help from other people.

Beginning in November 1958, he put more than one-third of the partnerships’ assets into Sanborn. He bought the stock for himself and for Susie. He had his aunt Alice, his father, his mother, his sisters, all buy it. He passed the Sanborn idea along to Cowin, to Stanback, to Knapp, and to Schloss. Some people got in on it as a favor from him. He took an override—a percentage of the profits—from others as a way of leveraging his capital. To get more shares under his control, he added Don Danly, his pinball-and-pilferage pal from high school; his father’s best friend, Vic Spittler; Dottie’s husband, Homer Rogers; and Howard Browne, the head of Tweedy, Browne and Reilly, the brokerage firm where Tom Knapp worked. He also put Catherine Elberfeld and Anne Gottschaldt, the aunt and mother of his friend Fred Kuhlken, into the stock. Since he had still not brought Gottschaldt and Elberfeld into a partnership, this strongly suggested that he thought Sanborn was a sure thing. Eventually he controlled enough of Sanborn’s shares to be elected to the board.

In March 1959, Warren took one of his regular trips to New York, staying out on Long Island at Anne Gottschaldt’s little white colonial house. By now she and her sister had adopted him as a sort of surrogate son, as if to replace the long-dead Fred. Warren kept spare sets of underwear and pajamas at her house, and Gottschaldt made him hamburgers for breakfast. On these journeys, he always set out with a list of between ten and thirty things he wanted to accomplish. He would go to the Standard & Poor’s library to look up some information. He would visit some companies, visit some brokers, and always spend time with Brandt, Cowin, Schloss, Knapp, and Ruane, his New York City network.

This particular trip was lengthy, about ten days. He had sit-downs with prospects for the partnership and another important appointment: his first meeting as a board member at Sanborn Map.

Sanborn’s board consisted almost entirely of insurance-company representatives—its biggest customers—so it operated more like a club than a business, except that the board meeting wasn’t followed by a round of golf. None of the board members owned more than token amounts of stock.3 At the meeting, Warren proposed that the company distribute the investments to the shareholders. But since the Depression and World War II, American businesses treated money as a scarce commodity to be hoarded and husbanded. This way of thinking had become automatic, its underlying premise unexamined, even though the economic justification for it had long disappeared. The board responded to the idea of separating the investment portfolio from the map business as preposterous. Then, toward the end of the meeting, the board broke out the humidor and passed around cigars. While they smoked, Warren sat fuming. “That’s my money paying for those cigars,” he thought. On the way back