• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Susie herself was less available these days. Like her father, she stayed busy and surrounded by people; she avoided being alone and unoccupied. She was vice president of the theater guild and involved with United Community Services. She shopped and dined with her large group of women friends, spending far more time with those in the Jewish and black communities than among white socialites.

Susie was becoming prominent among a group of Omaha women who were passionate civil-rights supporters. The battle to end segregation in employment and public facilities, and to remove obstacles to voting rights, was accelerating around the country. She helped organize the Omaha branch of the Panel of Americans, a speakers’ bureau that sent one Jew, one Catholic, one white Protestant, and one black Protestant to talk to civic groups, churches, and other organizations about their experiences. The panel was a way of trying to bring people together; one of Susie’s friends satirized her role on it as “to apologize for being a WASP.” The panel members answered audience questions such as: Why would a Negro want to move to a different part of town? Are any of you prejudiced against one another? Do Jews believe that Christ has been or that He is still coming? Don’t you think that sit-ins are just stirring up trouble? At a time when “Negroes” could not use public “white only” restrooms throughout much of the South, the sight of a black woman sitting as an equal on the same stage as white women stirred the audiences.1

In the afternoons, often with Susie Jr. in tow, Susie shot back and forth to meetings and committees on the north side of town, trying to tackle the city’s worst problem: dilapidated housing and abysmal living conditions in the ghetto.2 The police stopped her several times. “Why are you in this neighborhood?” they’d ask.

“Honey,” the fretful Doc Thompson told Susie Jr., “your mother is going to get killed.” He made her carry a police whistle when she rode with her mother. “Honey, you’re going to get kidnapped,” he said.3

Susie’s role as problem-solver and emotional carpet-sweeper meant that people thought of calling her whenever there was trouble, of any kind. She had referred to Warren as her “first patient,”4 and there were others. She stepped in more often now to manage Dottie’s life as her sister’s ability to cope declined and her drinking increased. She counseled Doris through her divorce from Truman and gave her a copy of a book, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, that Doris turned to again and again looking for hope amid misery.5 For several days, Susie housed an Ethiopian student whom her friend Sue Brownlee was sponsoring in Omaha because Brownlee’s father was visiting, and he would have been horrified at a “black woman sleeping in his bed.”6 As a cultural experience for the family, Susie arranged for an Egyptian exchange student who was attending the University of Omaha to move in with them for a semester.7 Outside of Warren’s study, the Buffetts’ home was never a refuge from the world, and opportunities for solitude were rare. Yet despite the freewheeling atmosphere, the children were growing up with a balance of freedom and discipline, strong ethical principles instilled by both parents, an excellent education, and an emphasis on enriching experiences. Warren and Susie had many long conversations about how to bring up children in a rich family so that they became self-sufficient rather than feeling entitled.

What the children lacked was attention. Their father was almost exclusively focused on work. Their mother was like a gardener with too many tomato plants, running with her watering can toward whoever was neediest at any given time. The children responded to this upbringing in their different ways. The older Little Susie got, the fewer overtures she made for her mother’s attention and the more authority she assumed over her brothers. She also worked as a crossing guard on the busy street outside their house, and spent much of her time with her own friends.8

Howie, the tornado, tunneled through the backyard,