The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [19]
Content with moderate gains in an upward-scrambling, freewheeling place, Sidney gradually built the store into a success.8 He married Evelyn Ketchum and they had six children, several of whom died young. Two sons, Ernest and Frank, were among the survivors.9
It has been said, “No man was ever better named than Ernest Buffett.”10 Born in 1877, he ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade, and joined his father behind the counter during the Panic of 1893. Far more eccentric than his businesslike brother, Frank Buffett became a large, stove-bellied man, the heathen among the Puritans of the family, who even enjoyed the occasional drink.
One day, a stunning young woman appeared at the store looking for a job. Her name was Henrietta Duvall, and she had traveled to Omaha to escape an unfriendly stepmother.11 Frank and Ernest were both immediately smitten, but it was the more handsome Ernest who won Henrietta as his wife in 1898. Ernest and Henrietta’s first child, Clarence, was born within a year of their marriage, followed by three more sons and a daughter. Shortly after the quarrel, Ernest went into a partnership with his father, Sidney; eventually he left to set up another grocery store. Frank remained single for most of his life, and for the next twenty-five years, as long as Henrietta lived, he and Ernest apparently never spoke.
Ernest set about becoming a pillar of the town. At his new store, the “hours were long, pay low, opinions cast in iron, and foolishness zero.”12 Always dressed in a dapper suit, he scowled from his desk on the mezzanine to stop his employees from idling, and penned letters demanding that suppliers “kindly speed up the celery.”13 He charmed his lady customers, but never hesitated to judge and carried a little black notebook to write down the names of people who irritated him—Democrats, and people who didn’t pay their grocery bills.14 Ernest was sure that the world needed his opinion and traveled to conferences around the country to bemoan the sorry state of the nation with like-minded businessmen.15 “Self-doubt was not his strong suit. He always spoke in exclamation points and expected you to acknowledge that he knew best,” says Buffett.
In a letter to his son and daughter-in-law advising them to always have some ready cash, he described the Buffetts as bourgeois incarnate:
“I might mention that there has never been a Buffett who ever left a very large estate, but there has never been one that did not leave something. They never spent all they made, but always saved part of what they made, and it has all worked out pretty well.”16
“Spend less than you make” could, in fact, have been the Buffett family motto, if accompanied by its corollary, “Don’t go into debt.”
Henrietta, also of French Huguenot extraction, was as thrifty, iron-willed, and teetotaling as her husband. A devout Campbellite,*4 she too felt the call to preach. While Ernest was at the store, she would harness the horses to the family’s fringed surrey and gather her children to drive out into the countryside, where she knocked on farmhouse doors to hand out tracts. Her temperament did nothing to lighten the Buffett family tendencies. In fact, by some accounts, Henrietta was the preachingest of all the preaching Buffetts who had ever lived.
The Buffetts were tradespeople, not members of the merchant or professional class, but as pioneer settlers of Omaha, they were exceedingly conscious of their place. Henrietta’s hope was that her four sons and daughter would become the first in the family to graduate from college. To pay for their schooling, she pared her household budget—more than was strictly necessary, it is said, even by Buffett standards. All the boys toiled at the family store when they were young. Then Clarence began a career in the oil business, with a graduate degree in geology.17 George, her second, got a PhD in chemistry and wound