The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [215]
A couple of months after the Sun’s coverage appeared, the Omaha Press Club put on its annual show. A team of singers got up and entertained the Who’s Who of Omaha (and more than a few from out of town). Their song satirized Monsignor Wegner and Boys Town:
We started up a home for boys,
’Bout fifty years ago;
We asked for contributions
And the dough began to flow.
We asked for all the charity
The traffic would allow;
Our homeless waifs were finally
Quite liberally endowed.
But then we had a tragedy,
Our bankroll was exposed,
And thanks to Warren Buffett
All those pocketbooks were closed.
(chorus)
Who threw the monkey wrench
In Father Wegner’s poor box?
Now we’re as popular
As if we had the smallpox.
It’s a dirty trick, you know,
Why did Warren Buffett throw
The monkey wrench in Father Wegner’s poor box?
Some folks came out from Hollywood,
To make a movie show;
Mickey Rooney showed the people
Where their cash should go.
Spencer Tracy played his part
With Roman piety;
We made enough off popcorn sales
To buy AT&T.
We passed the tin cup all around
To land on Easy Street;
Then Warren Buffett came along
And read our balance sheet.
We built palatial cottages,
To give our boys some class;
Instead of fish on Friday
We had pheasant under glass.
We talk a lot of poor mouth
But we’re never in the red;
It figures out to something
Like 200 grand a head.
Buffett blew the whistle
On a spiteful, jealous whim;
He must have figured we were getting
Just as rich as him!46
Buffett had never had so much fun reading a tax return, and wanted to keep the momentum going to make sure that, contrary to the monsignor’s prediction, the Sun would not be forgotten. The thought of a Pulitzer, the grandest prize in journalism, “started my adrenaline flowing,” he said.47 He got Paul Williams working on the paper’s submission for the prize. Williams prepared a detailed outline for Buffett, who had some strategic thoughts of his own, drawn from a long history with the newspaper business. “In a country where economics inevitably lead to one-daily towns,” Buffett wrote, the Sun’s submission should stress “the necessity for another printing press.” Another paper, even a weekly suburban, adds “value in terms of worrying Goliaths”—whereas the dominant paper may fear to do so, because it “may look silly.”48
Mick Rood wrote a follow-up piece about Boys Town—a good story that was also meant to keep worrying the Goliath—that drew on some racially bigoted comments Father Wegner had made in his interview, as well as certain disclosures he had made about the boys growing marijuana at Boys Town down by the lake. Paul Williams spiked it, saying the Sun had to take the high road, in part not to jeopardize future stories and in part to avoid looking anti-Catholic. Also, at this time the Pulitzer was pending. “Too bad,” wrote Rood in a note to himself.49
The Sun team knew it had strong competition for the Pulitzer. It would be up against the series of articles penned by Washington Post investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who had followed what appeared to be a minor burglary inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election campaign, and uncovered what turned out to be an enormous political spying and sabotage operation. But the Sun would fare very well in the prizes awarded for 1972 journalism.
In March 1973, Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism society, gave the Sun its highest award for public service; the Washington