The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [194]
What would he do now?
“I don’t have an answer to that question,” he wrote. “I do know that when I am sixty, I should be attempting to achieve different personal goals than those which had priority at age twenty.”17
The partners howled with disappointment, and a few with fear. Many were naïfs, like his aunt Alice. They were ministers, rabbis, schoolteachers, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law. His announcement amounted to a market call on stocks. He did not think the game would be worth playing anytime soon. He had taught even the inexperienced to be wary of an overheated market. Some trusted no one other than him. But “he just didn’t want to operate in an environment where he didn’t feel comfortable with the opportunities,” says John Harding, “especially when it was something that he felt he had to devote all his time to.”
Susie Buffett was happy that Warren was shutting down the partnership, at least for the kids’ sake. They cared desperately what their father thought of them. Susie Jr. had always gotten most of what little attention Warren provided, and Peter felt rewarded for being quiet and staying in the background. But fourteen-year-old Howie, who had always sought some emotional connection to his father that was never forthcoming, had grown wilder as he grew up. Susie Jr. would find a pair of mannequin legs covered with fake blood sticking out of her closet. He climbed on the roof in the gorilla costume to spy on her when she came home from dates and drenched her with the sprayer from the kitchen sink when she appeared in her prom dress. When their parents were in New York City, Howie seized the chance for an experiment in anarchy.18 Warren, still relying on Susie for everything, assumed she would take care of whatever Howie and the other kids needed. But by now, Susie herself had stopped trying to control her children. And she had long since let go of any idealistic expectations regarding her marriage. Her attention was increasingly taken up by an expanding number of “vagrants,” as one friend put it, who wandered through the house, sought her help, and occupied her time.19
Since she almost always accepted people unconditionally, some of those “clients” had pasts as felons, con men, addicts, or, in one case, as the purported proprietor of a bawdy house. From time to time these people conned her out of money. She didn’t really mind. Buffett was infuriated at the thought of being cheated himself, but he had eventually come to think of this as part of Susie’s giveaway budget and even accepted it as part of her charm.
Her large group of women friends continued to expand: Bella Eisenberg, Eunice Denenberg, Jeannie Lipsey, Rackie Newman, and others. Though Warren recognized who most of them were, this was Susie’s circle, not his. Other ties of hers, people like Rodney and Angie Wead, came from the activist community; another set of friends centered around the tennis courts at Dewey Park. And there was always the family: Leila, especially now that Roy Ralph had died and she had taken back the Buffett name; Fred and Katie Buffett and their son Fritz, who had married Warren and Susie’s former babysitter, Pam—also, of course, a friend of Susie’s now. Her nephews Tom and Billy Rogers were often around, as was another guitarist from the local music scene whom she had met through Billy, David Stryker. Like the Rogers boys and Dave Stryker, a number of Susie’s friends were younger: She was close to Renee and Annette Gibson, daughters of the baseball player Bob Gibson and his wife, Charlene. Several of the black students to whom she had given scholarships had come under her wing and wandered in from time to time: Russell McGregor, Pat Turner, and Duane Taylor, son of the jazz great Billy Taylor. And so it went.
Even though Susie