The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [174]
But even though Warren was like a kid in many ways, and Susie wished he were a more attentive father, he was loyal and committed: He showed up at school events and took the children on vacations. And while 1967, the year of White Rabbit and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, marked the apex of the rock-and-roll drug culture, with Susie Jr. in eighth grade, Howie in sixth, and Peter in third, the Buffetts were blessedly free of worries faced by many other parents.
Susie Jr. had developed from a timid child to a self-sufficient teen and the undisputed boss of her siblings. While her mother filled the house with ballads and soul music when she sang and played albums, Little Sooz had turned into a rock-and-roll girl; she introduced her brothers to groups like the Byrds and the Kinks. She was a straight kid, however, not sucked into the druggy element at school. Howie, now twelve, was still young enough to try to scare his sister and her friends by looming from the crabapple tree outside her window in a gorilla costume. But his pranks were getting more sophisticated, and more dangerous. He put Scout the dog on the roof, went downstairs, and called him to see if he would come. Scout did, and wound up at the vet with a broken leg. “Well, I just wanted to see if he would come,” Howie protested.2 To foil his mother from periodically locking him in his room out of frustration, he bought a lock at a hardware store and started locking her out. Peter spent hours at the piano, playing by himself or with his friend Lars Erickson. He was winning talent shows and seemed as absorbed in his music as his father was in making money.
The one person in the family who was seduced by the dark side of the psychedelic sixties was seventeen-year-old Billy Rogers, son of Susie’s sister, Dottie, now a budding jazz guitarist who was experimenting with drugs. His mother did some volunteer work and was an expert seamstress, but she also slept until noon, seemed paralyzed by making decisions, and at times was so distant and vague that it was literally impossible to carry on a coherent conversation with her. Dottie was drinking more and not paying attention to her kids. Susie often took Billy to watch Calvin Keys, a local jazz guitar player—so that Billy could learn technique from him, but also to try to straighten Billy out.3
She faced a daunting task in an era when the drug culture of pot and LSD was ubiquitous and Timothy Leary invited America to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The youth-led counterculture was rebelling against all forms of authority, everything for which the prior decades had stood. “This ain’t Eisenhower’s America no more,” said one of the hundred thousand hippies milling about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury that summer, as if that were explanation enough.4
Warren still lived in Eisenhower’s America. He had never suffered from Beatlemania. He wasn’t singing “Kumbaya” or putting up posters saying that war was unhealthy for children and other living things. His state of consciousness remained unaltered. His mind was deep in rigorous philosophical inquiry, torn between the cigar-butt philosophy of Ben Graham and the “great businesses” of Phil Fisher and Charlie Munger.
“I was in this Charlie Munger–influenced type transition—sort of back and forth. It was kind of like during the Protestant Reformation. And I would listen to Martin Luther one day and the Pope the next. Ben Graham, of course, being the Pope.”
While Munger was nailing his theses on the door of the Cigar Butt Cathedral, the market itself had abandoned all authorities past and present; as the 1960s progressed, chatter about stocks enlivened