The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [135]
Peter was now almost two, Howie five, and Little Sooz—who occupied her own pink checked-gingham kingdom with a canopy bed up a separate flight of stairs—six and a half. Howie tested his parents with destruction to see how much it took to get a reaction from them. He picked on Peter, who was slow to start talking, prodding him as if he were a science experiment to see how he would respond.11 Little Susie policed them both to keep things under control. She started figuring out ways to get back at Howie, once telling him to stick holes with a fork around the bottom of a milk carton. While Howie was enjoying the sight of milk spurting all over the kitchen table, she ran upstairs, crying, “Mommmmmm, Howie’s being bad again!”12 Warren simply turned to Susie to cope with their son’s explosive energy. And Howie remembers that his mother almost “never got angry, and was always supportive.”13
Susie juggled all this while playing the part of the standard-issue upper-middle-class wife circa 1960: appearing every day in her trademark look, a tailored dress or pantsuit, often in sunshine yellow, and a lacquered bouffant wig; taking perfect care of her husband and family; becoming a community leader; and gracefully entertaining her husband’s business associates as if this required no more effort than tossing a Swanson TV Dinner into the oven. Warren let her hire help, and soon a series of au pairs took up residence in an airy, light-filled room with its own bath on the second floor. Letha Clark, the new housekeeper, assumed some of the burden. Susie often started her day around noon by hosting a charity luncheon. After school, she shuttled Little Susie to Blue Birds. She would always describe herself as a simple person, but she steadily added layers of complexity to her life. She was setting up a group called the Volunteer Bureau14 to do office work and teach swimming at the University of Omaha. “You, too, can be a Paul Revere” was its motto, invoking an image of one individual saving an entire nation through his (or her) daring and self-sacrificing deeds.
Susie—like Paul Revere—was impatient to mount and ride;15 she dashed back and forth between family obligations and the growing number of people who wanted her attention. Many of these were disadvantaged or traumatized in some way.
Her closest friend, Bella Eisenberg, was an Auschwitz survivor who had made her way to America and Omaha after the camp was liberated. She thought of Susie as someone you could call at four o’clock in the morning when the demons got hold of you.16 Another, Eunice Denenberg, was only a child when she found her father after he hanged himself. Rarest of all among well-off white families, the Buffetts had black friends, including the most intimidating pitcher in baseball, Bob Gibson, and his wife, Charlene. Being a star athlete meant little in 1960 if you were black. “Those were the days when white people wouldn’t be seen with black people in Omaha,” says Buffett’s childhood friend Byron Swanson.17
Susie reached out to everyone; in fact, the more troubled the person, the more willingly she helped. She took a deep interest in the personal lives of people she barely knew. Warren recalls an incident when he left her on line at a concession stand during a football game. By the time he returned from the men’s room a few minutes later, the woman standing on line next to Susie was saying to her, “Now, I’ve never told anybody this before in my life…” as Susie listened, appearing fascinated. Almost everyone she met glowed under this kind of attention and felt touched by the encounter. But even with her closest friends, Susie nearly always took care not to share her own problems.
She played the same role of ministering angel with her own family, above all with her sister. Dottie, who was musical like Susie, had founded the Opera Guild, and remained the beauty of the family, but seemed vacant and, as one person put