The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [139]
Warren also tried to Tom-Sawyer Chuck Peterson into investing in it. “Warren, you must be out of your mind,” Peterson said. “Why would I want to go fifty-fifty with you on a train that you possess?” But Warren didn’t get this, so carried away was he by enthusiasm for the train and its accoutrements. “You can come over and use it,” he said. 32
The train filled much of the former ballroom’s space. It stood on pilings, with passageways underneath so that the diorama could be viewed from inside. Three locomotives carrying long chains of cars raced along an enormous spiraling track. They rocketed past villages and dove through forests, disappeared into tunnels, climbed mountains and dipped through valleys, stopping and starting at signals, and derailing just often enough to add a thrill when Buffett switched on the engines.33
Shining with the reflected glow of a delayed childhood, burnished with the patina of Omaha’s railroading history, the train was Warren’s totem. His children were forbidden to go near it. By now, his relentless obsession with money and obliviousness to his family were a running joke among his friends. “Warren, those are your children—you recognize them, don’t you?” people said.34 When he was not traveling, he could be found wandering through the house, nose buried in an annual report. The family swirled around him and his holy pursuit—the disengaged, silent presence, feet up in his stringy bathrobe, eyes fixed on the Wall Street Journal at the breakfast table.
The bookkeeping and banking and safety-depositing and post-officing required for his complicated empire, which had grown to almost four million dollars, eleven partnerships, and well over a hundred investors, now became almost overwhelming. Amazingly, Warren was still handling all the money and doing all the clerical work himself: filing the tax returns, typing the letters, depositing the dividend and capital checks, stopping for a meal at the Spare Time Café along the way, stuffing the stock certificates in the safety deposit box.
On January 1, 1962, Buffett dissolved all of the partnerships into a single entity, Buffett Partnership, Ltd.—or BPL. The partnerships had produced a stellar forty-six percent return in 1961, compared with the Dow’s twenty-two percent. After the partners invested more money that January 1, the new Buffett Partnership, Ltd., started the year with net assets of $7.2 million. In just six years, his partnerships had grown bigger than Graham-Newman. Yet when Peat, Marwick, Mitchell audited it, the auditor, Verne McKenzie, pored over the BPL files not in a conference room on Wall Street but in the alcove off Warren’s bedroom upstairs, where the two of them worked side by side.
Even Buffett realized by now that his growing collection of files, phone bills, and stock trades had reached the limits of what he could handle working in a home office. He disliked taking on overhead, but he could afford it.
Including his outside investments—which totaled well over half a million dollars by now—Warren had become a millionaire at age thirty.35 So he rented office space in Kiewit Plaza, a new white granite building a straight shot down Farnam Street about twenty blocks from his house and less than two miles from downtown. He and his father now shared space, a longtime goal of Warren’s, as well as a secretary. But Howard was clearly very ill. He soldiered gamely into the office with a stiff gait, making the effort. Warren’s face would shadow when he learned some new piece of ominous news about his father’s health, but mostly he tried to avoid knowing the details.
The new secretary tried to tell Warren what to do. “She thought she was a little motherly,” he says,