The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [26]
As the family prepared to move, Leila got word that her brother, Marion, now a successful lawyer in New York, had been stricken with incurable cancer at age thirty-seven. “My uncle Marion was the pride and joy of my mother’s family,” says Buffett, as well as their principal hope to carry on the family name, unsullied by insanity.41 His death that November, childless, devastated his family. The next piece of bad news arrived when Leila’s father, John Stahl, suffered another stroke that year, this one debilitating. Her sister Bernice, who cared for him at home, seemed increasingly sunk in depression. Her other sister, Edie, a schoolteacher, the prettiest and most adventurous of the girls, had vowed to stay single until either her thirties or until Bernice wed, but Leila, sharp and aware, refused to be trapped by her family’s woes. She was going to make it, no matter what; she was going to create a normal life with a normal family.42 She planned the move and bought new furniture. In a major step up in the world, Leila could afford to hire a part-time housekeeper, Ethel Crump.
Now a more experienced mother of a more prosperous family, Leila formed a much healthier relationship with her youngest child, Bertie, as the intervals between her rages lessened. Bertie knew her mother had a temper but says she always felt loved. Warren and Doris never did. And Leila’s obvious affection for Bertie did not help their sense of worthlessness.43
In November 1936, Roosevelt was reelected to a second term. Howard’s only consolation was that FDR would be out in another four years. While he read his conservative journals each night, the children listened to the radio, played games, or sang hymns as Leila accompanied them on the family’s latest acquisition—a pipe organ like the one her own mother had played.
While the Buffetts’ new house and occasional luxuries like the organ reflected their upward progress, Leila always bought her children thrifty, practical, forgettable gifts, clothing bought on sale that couldn’t be returned, and necessities—nothing that answered a child’s fantasies. Warren had a little single-oval HO-gauge train set and coveted a more elaborate version, the kind he saw at the Brandeis department store downtown, which had multiple engines twisting and turning past flashing lights and signals, rising over snow-covered hills and dropping into tunnels, racing past tiny villages and disappearing into pine forests. But the closest he came to owning it was buying the catalog that depicted it.
“If you were a little kid with one little oval track, looking at this thing, it was completely unbelievable. You’d gladly pay a dime for the model-train catalog and just sit there and fantasize.”
An introverted child, Warren could lose himself for hours in a model-train catalog. Sometimes, however, as a preschooler, he “hid,” as he put it, at his friend Jack Frost’s house, developing a babyish “crush” on Jack’s kindhearted mother, Hazel. As time passed, his habit grew of spending much time at neighbors’ and relatives’ houses.44 His favorite relative was his father’s sister Alice, a tall woman who had remained unmarried, lived at home with her father, and taught home economics. Surrounding Warren with warmth, she showed interest in everything he did and was thoughtful about how to motivate him.
By the time Warren entered kindergarten,45 his hobbies and interests revolved around numbers. Around age six, he became fascinated