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By Root 3350 0

antiwar protesters rallied in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. The stock market began to decline, down ten percent from the beginning of the year. Buffett had never stopped looking for things to buy, no matter how uphill the climb, but despite the market’s easing, the days of cigar butts scattered everywhere were gone. He became seriously worried about how to keep up his performance. He thought more often of buying entire businesses now. In fact, he had gotten started on an entirely new venture, one that consumed large amounts of his time.

29

What a Worsted Is

Omaha • 1966–1967

Buffett ran a $50 million partnership that owned a textile business, yet he had never stopped looking like the Raggedy Man.1 His only concession to the sideburns and long hair that other men wore was a little patch of fine dark hairs that he occasionally let sprout from his crew cut like baby grass over his domed forehead.

The rest of the world was turning mod. Men wore Nehru jackets, turtlenecks, and wide geometric-and floral-patterned ties. Buffett never varied his skinny striped ties and white shirt, though the shirt’s collar had grown tighter, and the jacket of the old gray suit he wore day after day bunched around his shoulders and gapped at the neckline. He refused to part with his favorite camel-colored V-neck sweater, although its elbows had grown thin. His shoes had holes in the soles. When Chuck Peterson tried to introduce him to a potential investor at a party, the man’s reaction had been “You’re kidding!” He didn’t even want to talk to Buffett, based purely on the way Warren dressed.2 Susie had no influence; her husband’s taste had formed back in 1949 when he was selling suits at JC Penney’s, and Mr. Lanford told him that “nobody knows what a worsted is.”

He now bought his suits at Parsow’s, downstairs in the lobby of Kiewit Plaza, where Sol Parsow was always trying to upgrade his taste. Buffett considered Parsow a “very wild dresser” and paid no attention to his suggestions. Warren’s idea of a proper suit was one “that you could bury a ninety-year-old banker from a small town in western Nebraska in.”3 Parsow prided himself on giving Buffett good advice about stocks, however. He had steered him away from hatter Byer-Rolnick, warning that hats were going out of style. He had also kept him from investing in Oxxford Clothes, delivering the news that suits were not a growth business in the 1960s.4 Buffett, however, had ignored Parsow’s warning not to buy suit-lining maker Berkshire Hathaway.5

Since he knew nothing about clothing, why the next episode of his career would consist of buying a department store remains somewhat mysterious. It took a whopper of an idea to crack open his wallet these days. But in 1966 he was having trouble finding things to buy for the partnership.

It was one of his newer friends, David “Sandy” Gottesman, who brought him this latest idea. Gottesman was like Fred Stanback, Bill Ruane, Dan Cowin, Tom Knapp, Henry Brandt, Ed Anderson, and Charlie Munger: people who worked their own ideas and fed ideas to him. The ever-handy Ruane had connected them at a lunch in New York City. Gottesman, a fellow Harvard graduate from a different year, worked for a small investment bank and sometimes found the odd cigar butt or two.6 Buffett considered him a shrewd, disciplined, hard-nosed, opinionated, unabashed capitalist. Naturally, they hit it off.

“From then on,” says Gottesman, “every time I had a good idea, I would call Warren. It was like vetting. If you could get Warren interested in something, you knew that you had the right idea.” The quintessential New Yorker, Gottesman valued his time with Buffett highly enough to be willing to travel to Omaha often. “We’d stay up till late at night talking about stocks,” he says, “and then I’d go back the next morning and go to work in New York. We also talked every Sunday night at around ten o’clock for maybe an hour and a half about stocks. I was looking forward to that conversation all week, thinking about what are the stocks I