The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [27]
Warren would pick up his stopwatch and summon his sisters to join him in the bathroom they shared to watch the new game he had invented.46 He filled the bathtub with water and picked up his marbles. Each had a name. He lined them up on the flat edge at the back of the tub. Then he clicked the stopwatch just as he swept the marbles into the water. They raced down the porcelain slope, clicking and rattling, jumping as they hit the waterline. The marbles chased each other toward the stopper. When the first one hit, Warren punched the stopwatch and declared the winner. His sisters watched him race the marbles over and over, trying to improve their times. The marbles never tired, the stopwatch never erred, and—unlike his audience—Warren never seemed bored by the repetition.
Warren thought about numbers all the time and everywhere, even in church. He liked the sermons, he was bored by the rest of the service; he passed the time by calculating the life span of hymn composers from their birth and death dates in the hymnals. In his mind, the religious should reap some reward for their faith. He assumed that hymn composers would live longer than average. Living longer than average seemed to him an important goal. But piety, he found, did nothing to improve longevity. Lacking any personal sense of grace, he began to feel skeptical about religion.
The bathtub steeplechase and the information he had collected about the hymn composers had taught him something else, however, something valuable. He was learning to calculate odds. Warren looked around him. There were opportunities to calculate odds everywhere. The key was to collect information, as much information as you could find.
7
Armistice Day
Omaha • 1936–1939
When Warren started first grade at Rosehill School in 1936,1 he took to it right away. For one thing, it liberated him from spending part of the day at home with his mother. School opened up a whole new world for him, and right away he made two friends, Bob Russell and Stu Erickson. He and Bob, whom he called “Russ,” began walking to school together, and on some days, he went over to the Russells’ house after school. On other days, Stu, whose family lived in a modest frame house, went to the Buffetts’ new brick home in the Happy Hollow country club neighborhood. Warren had something to do almost every day after school until his father returned from work. He had always gotten along with other children; now they kept him safe.
He and Russ would sit on the Russells’ porch for hours, watching the traffic on Military Avenue. Scribbling in notebooks, they filled column after column with the license-plate numbers of passing cars. Their families found this hobby strange but attributed it to the boys’ love of numbers. They knew Warren liked to calculate the frequency of letters and numbers on license plates. And he and Russ never explained their real reason. The street in front of the Russells’ house was the only route out of a cul-de-sac neighborhood where the Douglas County Bank was located. Warren had convinced Russ that if someday that bank were robbed, the cops could nab the robbers using license-plate numbers. And only he and Russ would own the evidence that the cops would need to solve the crime.
Warren liked anything that involved collecting, counting, and memorizing numbers. He was already a keen stamp and coin collector. He counted how often letters recurred in the newspaper and in the Bible. He loved to read and spent many hours with books he checked out of the Benson Library.
But it was the crime-fighting and the theatrical potential of the license plates—which his family and the Russells never knew about—that brought out other aspects of his temperament. He