The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [21]
The Stahls viewed themselves as part of the masses, the class that the rest rested upon. Their ability to bear that load was not increasing. By 1918, Leila’s sixteen-year-old sister Bernice—considered the dullard of the sisters, with a tested IQ of 139—had apparently begun to give up on life. She was convinced she would end up mentally ill like her grandmother and mother, and die like her grandmother in the Nebraska State Insane Asylum.22 During this time, Leila’s educational schedule suggests a chaotic home life. She delayed going to college for two years to help her father. After a single semester at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she returned home for another year to help out again.23 Energetic and considered the brightest of the girls, Leila later portrayed this episode in a different light, describing her family as perfect and saying that she stayed out of college three years to earn her tuition.
When she arrived at Lincoln in 1923, she had one clear and acknowledged ambition, which was to find a husband. She headed straight to the college newspaper and asked for a job.24 A small-boned girl with a soft brown bob who bustled like the robin of spring, Leila wore a charming smile that softened the expression in her arrowhead-sharp eyes. Howard Buffett, who had started at the Daily Nebraskan as a sportswriter before rising to editor, hired her straightaway.
Good-looking in a dark-haired, professorish way, Howard was one of only thirteen in the entire student body who had been “tackled” for the Innocents, a society of outstanding men on campus modeled after the honorary societies of Harvard and Yale. Named for the thirteen Popes Innocent of Rome, the Innocents declared themselves champions against evil. They also sponsored the prom and Homecoming.25 Presented with such a big man on campus, Leila grabbed him instantly.
“Well, I don’t know whether she worked very much on the Daily Nebraskan,” Howard said later, “but she sure worked on me. I’ve never regretted it—don’t make any mistake about it—it’s the best deal I ever made.”26 But Leila was a good student with a head for mathematics, so when she announced plans to drop out of college and marry, her calculus professor reportedly slammed down the textbook in dismay.27
Howard, who was about to graduate, went to his father to discuss his choice of career. He had no real interest in money but, at Ernest’s insistence, gave up the high-minded, low-paying business of journalism and the possibility of law school in favor of selling insurance.28
The newlyweds moved into a tiny white four-room bungalow in Omaha, which Ernest filled with groceries as their wedding gift. Leila furnished it top to bottom for $366—items bought, she noted, at “sort of wholesale prices.”29 From that day forward she channeled her energy, ambition, and talent for math—which by all accounts exceeded her husband’s—into boosting Howard’s career.30
In early 1928, the Buffetts’ first child, Doris Eleanor, was born.31 Later that year, Leila’s sister Bernice suffered a mental breakdown and quit her teaching job. But Leila seemed free of the moody listlessness that oppressed her mother and sister. A whirlwind of energy, she could talk nonstop for hours (although she litanied the same stories). Howard called her the “Cyclone.”
As the Buffetts settled into the life of a young married couple, Leila got Howard to join her own First Christian Church, and noted proudly in her “day book” when he was made a deacon.32 Still avidly interested in politics, Howard began to show signs of the family urge to preach. But when he and Ernest turned the dinner table into a forum for endless discussions of the subject, Howard’s brother Fred was so bored that he would lie down on the floor and go to sleep.
Leila had converted to her new husband’s politics, however, and was now an enthusiastic Republican. The Buffetts applauded Calvin Coolidge, the man who proclaimed