The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [160]
He vowed that he would have Berkshire; he would buy it all. He would own it lock, stock, loom, and spindle. That Berkshire Hathaway was a failing, futile enterprise daunted him not. It was cheap, and he craved it. Above all, he wanted Seabury Stanton not to have it. Buffett and the other shareholders deserved it more. In his determination, he ignored all the lessons learned from the experience at Dempster—save one. And that was the one he should have ignored.
Buffett sent his scouts out, looking for more chunks of the closely held stock. Cowin got hold of enough to join Berkshire’s board. But other people began to take notice too. Jack Alexander, Buffett’s old friend from Columbia, had an investment partnership with his classmate Buddy Fox. “One day we saw that Warren was buying this Berkshire Hathaway,” he says. “And we started to buy.” On a trip to New York from their office in Connecticut they told him they were following him in the stock, “He got very upset. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re riding on my coattails. That’s not right. Cut it out.’”
Fox and Alexander were taken aback. What were they doing wrong? Buffett gave them to understand that he was seeking control. Yet coattail-riding, even in control situations, was a popular pastime among the Graham crowd. It was considered sporting conduct. In effect, Buffett took their stock. I need it more than you, he said. They agreed to sell their stock to him at the then-market price, because it clearly mattered to him so much. He appeared to have some sort of mysterious attachment to Berkshire Hathaway. “It wasn’t that important to us. It was obviously very important to him,” Alexander says.
Like Fox and Alexander, a few others had also become Buffett-watchers, tracking Warren’s trail like the spoor of Bigfoot. This created competition for the stock. He made it understood among the Grahamites that they were to keep their mitts off Berkshire. The only exception was Henry Brandt; he let Brandt—in recompense for his services—buy it below $8.00. He had begun to carry himself with a bit of swagger, which some people found irritating. Yet his surefootedness, the way he always seemed to be so right, kept them fascinated. Even his cheapskate qualities were part of the aura. For years he had been possibly the only person doing business regularly in New York who managed to get by with not only free lodging (by staying with Fred Kuhlken’s mother, Anne Gottschaldt, on Long Island), but free office space to boot (at Tweedy, Browne).
Photo Insert One
Image 1
Warren, around age two.
Image 2
Warren in 1933 on the running board of the family’s first car, a used Chevrolet.
Image 3
Warren dressed in one of his earliest costumes, which his father brought back from a business trip to New York City.
Image 4
Ernest Buffett surrounded by his grandchildren: Warren and Doris at left, Bertie in Ernest’s lap.
Image 5
Sidney Buffett, who founded the family grocery store in 1869, in a 1930 photograph with Alice Buffett, his granddaughter.
Image 6
The Stahl sisters in West Point, Nebraska, around 1913. Warren's mother Leila is top right. Seated beside her is Edith and, in front, Bernice.
Image 7
Warren’s father Howard (right rear) plays with his siblings George, Clarence, and Alice in the family’s fringed surrey. His mother Henrietta (holding younger brother Fred in her lap) sits in the back seat.
Image 8
Howard and Leila Buffett, shortly after their marriage in 1925.
Image 9
Warren and Bertie in front of the family’s Buick, around 1938.
Image 10
A revealing family portrait, around 1937.
Image 11
Warren, age six, holds his favorite toy, a nickel-plated money-changer, in a photograph with his sisters from the winter of 1936-1937. He and Doris later recalled the unhappiness their faces expressed.
Image 12
The eighth-grade class at Rosehill School, May 1938, showing the girls and