• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Image 13

Fred and Ernest Buffett in front of the Buffett & Son grocery store.

Image 14

Bertie, Leila, and Warren sing to Doris’s accompaniment in Washington around 1945.

Image 15

A 1948 campaign flyer for the only election Howard ever lost.

Image 16

Howard Buffett, Congressman.

Image 17

Warren (second left) and his father (fourth left) on a fishing trip with the Nebraska congressional delegation around 1945. The Buffetts look as though they’d rather be elsewhere.

Image 18

As a preteen, Warren’s first love was Daisy Mae Scragg. She always loved Li’l Abner, no matter how he treated her.

Image 19

Warren takes the contrarian view in a January 1946 debate about Congress’s problems; this aired on the Washington radio station WTOP’s “American School of the Air.”

Image 20

Warren in the late 1940s, playing the uke in his classic battered tennis shoes and saggy socks.

Image 21

The Buffetts in the summer of 1950. “Doris and Bertie were knockouts,” says Warren, who felt socially maladjusted.

Image 22

Warren’s pledge photo for Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, January 1948. Howard Buffett was also an Alpha Sig.

Image 23

Warren, Norma Thurston, and Don Danly pose next to the Springfield Rolls-Royce Brewster Coupe. Don and Warren bought it as a stunt in 1948.

Now that Susie accompanied him on some of these trips, however, at her behest he had upgraded from hosteling with his deceased college friend’s mother to taking a room at the Plaza Hotel. Not only was the Plaza more convenient for business, but from Susie’s perspective, it put department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, Best & Company, and Henri Bendel close at hand. Then a rumor circulated among Buffett’s friends—the kinds of rumors that always swirled around Buffett, like the one that had him stashing his daughter in a dresser drawer rather than buying her a crib—a rumor that he had found the Plaza’s cheapest room, a tiny windowless cubicle like his old maid’s room at Columbia, and cut a deal to stay there at a beggarly price whenever he came alone to New York.35 Regardless of the rumor’s truth, each time he checked in to the Plaza he doubtless felt a pang of regret, for he no longer stayed in New York scot-free.

The trips to Bergdorf’s were another aspect of how much the New York routine had changed. Susie spent her days going to lunch and shopping; in the evenings they went to dinner, then Broadway or cabaret shows. He liked to see her enjoy herself, and she had become used to shopping at the better stores. Nevertheless, while she now had the power to loosen the purse strings, their game was to tussle over how much money she got to spend. Her way of justifying spending was to do it on someone else’s behalf. Susie Jr. was often a beneficiary; her closets filled with clothes from Bergdorf’s. One time Susie came back from New York with an ermine jacket. They had met a friend of Warren’s who took them to a furrier. “I felt like I had to buy something,” she said. “They were being so nice to me.” She had done it for the furrier’s sake.

Now, all this protecting Berkshire from coattailing would be for naught unless Buffett figured out how to run it well enough to keep Susie in ermine jackets. He made another visit to New Bedford, going by the mill to see Jack Stanton, the heir apparent. Somebody was going to have to run the place once it was wrested from Seabury’s hands, and Warren needed to know who that would be.

But Stanton claimed to be very busy, and sent Ken Chace to escort Buffett around the mill.*22 Stanton had no idea that his uncle had already suggested Chace as a possible replacement for Seabury.

Ken Chace was a chemical engineer by training, forty-seven, quiet, controlled, and sincere. He did not know that he was a contender to run the company; nonetheless, he spent two days teaching Buffett the textile business while Buffett asked question after question and Chace explained the mills’ problems. Buffett was impressed by his