The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [20]
Howard, the third son and Warren’s father, was born in 1903. He had unhappy memories of feeling like an outsider during his years at Central High School in the early 1920s. Omaha was run by a handful of families who owned the stockyards, banks, department stores, and had inherited fortunes from the breweries now closed under Prohibition. “My clothes were pretty much hand-me-downs from my two older brothers,” he said, “and I was a paperboy and the son of a grocery man. So the high school fraternities didn’t look my way, and I was just one of the boys from what approximated outside of the tracks.” He felt these snubs keenly; they marked him with a deep revulsion toward rank and privilege acquired by birth.18
At the University of Nebraska, Howard majored in journalism and worked at the college newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, where he was able to combine the outsider’s love of reporting on the activities of the powerful with the family fascination with politics. It would not be long before he met Leila Stahl, a girl whose background mingled the same interest in newspapers with self-consciousness about social class.
Leila’s father, John Stahl, a sweet little dumpling of a man of good German-American descent, had traveled Cuming County, Nebraska, in a horse and buggy with a buffalo robe on his lap as superintendent of schools.19 The family history says he adored his wife, Stella, who gave him three daughters—Edith, Leila, and Bernice—and one son, Marion. Of English descent, Stella was unhappy living in West Point, Nebraska, a town of German-American hausfraus, where she never felt at ease. It is said that she consoled herself by playing the pipe organ. In 1909, Stella suffered a mental breakdown. This must have seemed an ominous recurrence of family history, for her mother, Susan Barber, who was described as “maniacal,” had been an inmate of the Nebraska State Insane Asylum, where she died in 1899. After an incident in which, according to family lore, Stella went after Edie with the fireplace poker, John Stahl gave up his traveling job to care for their children. Increasingly, Stella retreated to her darkened room, where she sat twisting her hair, apparently depressed. This isolation was punctuated by occasional episodes of cruel behavior toward her husband and the girls.20 Stahl, realizing that he could not leave the children alone with their mother, bought a newspaper, the Cuming County Democrat, so he could make a living working from home. From the time Leila was five, she and her sisters essentially ran the household and helped their father put out the paper. She learned to spell by setting type. “When I was in the fourth grade,” she recounted, “we had to come home from school and set type before we could go out and play.” By age eleven she could run a jackhammer of a Linotype press, and every Friday she missed school because of the headaches she suffered after having to get out the paper on Thursday night. Living above the business in a house infested by mice, the family pinned all their hopes for the future on Marion, the brilliant brother who was studying to be a lawyer.
During World War I the Stahls’ difficulties grew. When the Cuming County Democrat came out against Germany in a German-American town, half their subscribers dropped the paper and switched to the West Point Republican— a financial catastrophe. John Stahl himself was an ardent supporter of the Democratic political giant William Jennings Bryan. At the turn of the century, Bryan had been one of the most important politicians of his era, nearly becoming President of the United States. In his heyday, he stood for a kind of “populism” that he set forth in his most famous speech:
“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The