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very little work on its behalf. Wegner considered them a nuisance and had told Rood, “They’ve never been of much help,” and “They don’t know anything about social welfare…they don’t know anything about education.”34 According to Williams, whatever they may have actually known, the board’s reactions to the reporters’ questions ranged from “dismay to innocence or downright ignorance.”35 Another Boys Town official would later put it this way with hindsight: “The board has not been all that good in serving Father Wegner…. The board could have advised him about slowing down on the fund-raising.”36

And that was indeed the irony. It was Boys Town’s background of Depression-era poverty that had probably led Wegner to accumulate money as if the “wolf was at the door,” as Randy Brown put it.37 This same background had very likely lulled the board into overseeing Wegner’s activities without questioning whether they made sense. But Warren Buffett, a product of the very same environment, who had the very same impulses, was going to bust them for it. The crime, in his eyes, was not just accumulating the money. It was piling it up mindlessly without a plan to use it. Boys Town didn’t even have a budget.38 The sin to Buffett was an abdication of fiduciary responsibility, the failure to manage money responsibly on others’ behalf.

The reporters worked feverishly on the story all weekend, Buffett and Lipsey reading copy as it progressed. “We were this little nothing weekly paper,” says Buffett, but they intended to meet the journalistic standard of a top national daily. Finally they all trooped over to Paul Williams’s living room, spread everything out on the floor, and tried to figure out headlines and captions. The story’s banner lead asked: “Boys Town: America’s Wealthiest City?” An eight-page special section with sidebars, it led off with a kicker in the form of a Bible verse, Luke 16:2—“Give an account of thy stewardship.”

On the Wednesday afternoon before publication, Williams sent the story to the Associated Press, UPI, the Omaha World-Herald, and television stations. The next day, March 30, 1972, would be recalled by Buffett as one of the greatest of his life. The story not only fulfilled his wish to run a business as a church, but the section opened with a Bible-quoting headline about a favorite concept, stewardship—the lens through which he now viewed duty, moral obligation, and the responsibility that went along with a position of trust. By the end of that week, the wire services had broken the Boys Town story across the country and exposed a national scandal.39 On Saturday, the Boys Town board held an emergency meeting and decided to cancel all fund-raising, including the spring mailing for which envelopes had already been partly stuffed.40 In a new era of investigative reporting, the drama was of such magnitude that it gave an immediate push to reforms in the way nonprofits were governed all over the United States. The story was picked up by Time, Newsweek, Editor & Publisher, and the LA Times, among others.41 An informal survey of twenty-six boys’ homes showed that immediately after the exposé, more than a third of them said that their fund-raising efforts were affected.42

But Monsignor Francis Schmitt, an understudy of Wegner’s who had begun assuming some of his duties, quickly circulated a letter to Boys Town supporters calling the Sun “a kind of Shopper’s Guide.” It said, “There can only have been yellow journalism, prejudice, jealousy, and, for all I know, bigotry involved in the story,” suggesting that the motive was anti-Catholic bias. In fact, the reporters had bent over backward to avoid such a bias. Moreover, Schmitt said, the story was full of “snide innuendos” that cut into his vitals all “because of a cheap editor of a cheap paper, whose owner is himself a millionaire many times over.”43 Wegner also remained unrepentant. “Boys Town,” he said, “will still be here when that yellow rag, what’s it called”—the Sun—“is forgotten.”44 To people who wrote asking about the Boys Town story, Wegner was sending out a form