The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [163]
Seabury, his nearly bald seventy-year-old head speckled with age spots, claimed that he had planned to retire in December to let Jack succeed him. But, he said, he could not continue as president “of an organization over which he would not have complete authority.”44 With as much hauteur as his character allowed him—which was considerable, despite the mutineers having taken over the ship—Seabury made a little speech, commending himself for his accomplishments. Then he tendered his resignation, and the board accepted it. Jack Stanton added a bitter little coda, saying that, had he become president in December, he was certain that it would have meant “continued success and profitable operations.” The board listened patiently, then accepted his resignation as well.
At that point, Jack Stanton put down his pen and stopped taking the minutes in which these two speeches had been recorded, and the two Stantons stalked out of the room. The board paused, and sighed with relief.
Moving quickly on, the board elected Buffett chairman and confirmed Ken Chace in his new job running the doomed company that Buffett—in a moment of folly—had exerted such strenuous effort to acquire. A few days later, he explained his thinking on textiles in a newspaper interview. “We’re neither pro nor con. It’s a business decision. We try to assess a business. Price is the big factor in investment. It determines the decision. We bought Berkshire Hathaway at a good price.”45
He would later come to revise that opinion.
“So I bought my own cigar butt, and I tried to smoke it. You walk down the street and you see a cigar butt, and it’s kind of soggy and disgusting and repels you, but it’s free…and there may be one puff left in it. Berkshire didn’t have any more puffs. So all you had was a soggy cigar butt in your mouth. That was Berkshire Hathaway in 1965. I had a lot of money tied up in the cigar butt.46
“I would have been better off if I’d never heard of Berkshire Hathaway.”
28
Dry Tinder
Omaha • 1965–1966
The dynamics changed one hundred percent when my father died,” says Doris. “Everything went flying into space. My father was the linchpin of our family. The center was gone.”
Leila had endured multiple losses over recent years. Her mother, Stella, had died in 1960 in Norfolk State Hospital, and her sister Bernice had died a year later of bone cancer. Without Howard, she had to find a new sense of purpose, and she became dependent on Warren and Susie and their family. The grandchildren went to her house on Sundays, where she gave them bags of candy to eat during church, then took them to lunch afterward and gave them money if they could add up the bill correctly. In the afternoons, she took them to Woolworth’s to buy a toy to play with at her house. Like Howard, who had once paid his children to go to church, she found a Buffettesque solution to the problem of her loneliness—making deals with the grandchildren so that they would stay with her as long as possible.
Howard’s presence was what had always made being with Leila tolerable to Doris and Warren. Without him, both found visits with their mother unbearable. Warren trembled when forced to be in proximity to her. At Thanksgiving, he took a plate, went upstairs, and ate dinner by himself. Leila continued to erupt in occasional fits of rage. For decades, her bizarre behavior had been aimed only at family members, though once she leaped out of the car in a parking lot and spent an hour screaming at an acquaintance over some trivial matter, as Big Susie and Howie looked on in astonishment. But Doris, who had idolized her father even more than her brother had, was still her main victim. Doris had always felt she had let the whole family down with her divorce from Truman. The contrast between Warren and Susie’s successes and her own life as a divorcée at a time when divorce was still rare only reinforced her lingering feelings of worthlessness. Shortly before his death, Howard had told her that she must remarry to provide a father for her children. So she did, to George