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By Root 3184 0

had heard was that Boys Town, one of Omaha’s sacred cows, had turned into a hog. A refuge for homeless boys, Boys Town was founded in an old mansion near downtown in 1917 by Father Edward Flanagan, an Irish priest who wanted to save orphans and rejected children from wasted lives as drifters, criminals, or addicts. “Father Flanagan was famous around town for getting five bucks at a time,” says Buffett, “and as soon as he got it, he spent it on a kid. Then he got ninety dollars and he put twenty-five kids in a house.”13 In its early years, Boys Town had always struggled financially, but it grew nonetheless. By 1934 it occupied a 160-acre campus ten miles west of Omaha complete with a school, dormitories, a chapel, a dining hall, and athletic facilities. With help from Howard Buffett, Boys Town set up its own post office in 1934 to assist in fund-raising.14 It became an incorporated village in 1936. Then a 1938 Oscar-winning film starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney brought it national fame.

When Ted Miller, a professional fund-raiser, saw the movie, he recognized how to transform Boys Town’s fund-raising appeals into a huge national campaign. Every year at Christmas time, Boys Town, which now called itself “The City of Little Men,” sent out millions of letters that began, “There will be no joyous Christmas season this year for many homeless and forgotten boys….” and bore the picture the movie made famous of a street urchin carrying a tot with the legend “He ain’t heavy, Father…He’s m’brother.”

People sent in as little as a dollar, but even small amounts coming from a tiny percentage of the tens of millions of letters that had been sent out added up to a lot of money.15 Boys Town, then awash in contributions, expanded to a 1,300-acre campus with a stadium, a souvenir shop, a farm where the boys worked as hired hands, and vocational training facilities. Father Flanagan died in 1948, but the money kept rolling in under his successor, Monsignor Nicholas Wegner. It was now a virtual shrine that was the state’s biggest tourist attraction.

“I used to hear these stories about how the U.S. National Bank put on extra people for weeks and weeks before Christmas just to handle the Boys Town money that was coming in. Meanwhile, of course, I saw the boy count coming down.”

In its early years, Flanagan had searched court records and taken in a certain number of hard-core delinquents, even a few murderers. But by 1971, the home screened out the emotionally disturbed, mentally retarded, and serious juvenile offenders; it tried to limit its occupants to “homeless” boys who had no other significant problems.16 Built to house a thousand, Boys Town now employed some six hundred people to care for its six hundred and sixty-five boys.17 However, its gigantic institutional approach of housing boys in a same-sex facility, isolated from the surrounding community, with a custodial, even prisonlike atmosphere, had begun to seem out of date.18 The boys moved to the signal of bells: They prayed at the first bell in the giant “chow hall,” sat down to the second, ate at the third, put down their forks at the fourth whether they were finished or not, stood and prayed at the fifth, and dashed out of the chow hall at the sixth. Their mail was censored and they were allowed only one visitor a month, chosen by the staff, not themselves. They worked at menial jobs and had little recreation and no contact with girls. Boys Town emphasized low-grade vocational training: picking beans and making birdhouses.

So one evening in July 1971, at a meeting at the Buffetts’ house, Warren and Sun editor Paul Williams discussed the Boys Town rumors and decided to commission a story on how the institution raised and spent its money. The Sun had already made a couple of runs at this story and was told by Boys Town, “We don’t discuss our finances.”19 Now Williams took three city reporters, Wes Iverson, Doug Smith, and Mick Rood, and set them to work on the confidential “Project B,” planning an elaborate investigative reporting project. 20 Having noticed that the Boys