The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [25]
Outside the tidy white bungalow on Barker Avenue, Nebraska was sliding into lawlessness. Bootlegging flourished in Omaha until Warren was three years old.25 Out in the countryside, farmers faced with foreclosure on mortgages backed by nearly worthless farmland rose up in civil disobedience.26 Five thousand farmers marched on the state capitol in Lincoln until panicked lawmakers hastily passed a mortgage moratorium bill.27
As the cold winds scoured the parched western sand hills in November of 1933, they kicked up vast swirls of topsoil in towering black clouds that swept eastward as far as New York City at a clipper speed of sixty miles per hour. The gale shattered plate-glass windows and blasted cars off the road in its wake. The New York Times compared it to the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. The dust-storm years had begun.28
In the middle of the worst drought of the twentieth century, Midwesterners took refuge in their homes as grit sandblasted the paint and pitted the glass on their automobiles. Leila swept red dust off the porch every morning. On Warren’s fourth birthday, a cloud of ruddy dust buried the Buffetts’ front porch and the wind blew the paper plates and napkins off the party table.29
Along with the dust came years of extraordinary heat. In summertime 1934 the thermometer in Omaha hit 118 degrees. After searching for days, a Nebraska farmer found his cow down a crack in a remote stubble field, trapped when the parched earth split apart.30 Plainsmen told tall tales about someone who fainted dead away when hit in the face by a drop of water and had to be revived with three buckets of sand. People slept in their backyards, camped on the grounds of Central High School, and on the grassy lawn of Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum, so as not to roast in the ovens of their own homes. Warren tried in vain to sleep covered in bedsheets soaked with water, but nothing could cool the baked air that steamed up to his second-story room.
With the record drought and heat of 1934,31 millions of grasshoppers arrived to devour the parched corn and wheat down to stubble.32 Leila’s father, John Stahl, suffered a stroke that year, and while visiting his grandfather in West Point, Warren could hear the background drone of the ravenous hoppers. At their worst, they consumed fence posts, the laundry on the clothesline, and finally one another, gumming up tractor engines and clouding the air, thick enough to obscure a car.33
In truth, the early 1930s brought many other things to fear than fear itself.34 The economy worsened. Imitators of the era’s most notorious gangsters—Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson—roamed the Midwest, pillaging the already vulnerable banks.35 Parents worried about the dust-bowl drifters and gypsies who passed through town. Occasional “mad dog” rabies scares quarantined children at home. The public swimming pools closed in the dog days of summer out of fear of “infantile paralysis”—polio—and parents warned their children constantly that if their lips touched the public water fountain, it could put them in an iron lung.36
Yet Nebraskans were trained from birth to respond to calamity with teeth-gritted optimism. Those years of dust and drought simply formed the backdrop to Midwestern life. The children grew up accustomed to outlandish weather in a state plagued with tornadoes and winds strong enough to blow a train from its tracks.37
The three little Buffetts went to school, played with friends, and ran around with a dozen kids in hundred-degree weather at neighborhood potluck picnics, their fathers in suits and their mothers in dresses and stockings.
Many of their neighbors may have suffered, their standard of living in decline, but Howard, son of a grocery man, had elevated his family into the more comfortable half of the middle class. “We made steady progress even in those tough times,” he was to recall, “in an extremely modest sort of way.” He was being modest about the family’s modesty. While fifty men stood in line for a $17-a-week job driving the orange Buffett & Son grocery trucks, Howard