The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [28]
Warren’s favorite games, however, were competitive, even if he was only competing with himself. He progressed from the bathtub steeplechase to a yoyo, then to bolo, sending the bolo ball on its rubber string flying away from his wooden paddle a thousand times. On Saturday afternoons at the Benson Theater, in between movies—three films for a nickel, plus a serial—he stood on the stage with other kids, competing to see who could keep the ball going longest. In the end everyone else stepped down, exhausted, leaving him alone onstage, still smacking the ball.
He even played out his competitiveness in his special, teasing, warm relationship with Bertie. He called her “chubby” because it made her mad and tricked her into singing at the dinner table, which was against the family rules. He played games with her constantly but never let her win, even though she was three years younger. But he had a tender side too. Once when Bertie stuffed her treasured Dy-Dee doll in a wastebasket in a fit of anger at her mother, Warren rescued it and returned it to her in the sunroom. “I found this in the wastebasket,” he said. “You wouldn’t want this in the wastebasket, would you?”2 Even as a child, Bertie recognized that her brother knew how to be tactful.
Bertie, on the other hand, was the self-confident, adventurous one, which Doris and Warren thought might explain why Leila rarely tore into her. Bertie had her own theory, seeing herself as someone who was able to keep up appearances in the way that their mother valued.
What mattered most to Leila was the esteem of others; she had what Warren would later come to call an Outer Scorecard. She was always worrying about what the neighbors would think, nagging her daughters to create the right appearance. “I was so careful to do the right things. I didn’t want it to happen to me,” Bertie says of Leila’s tirades.
Doris was the rebellious one. Early on, she displayed a refined sense of taste and a high threshold for excitement, which put her at odds with the Buffetts’ sedate routines and cheeseparing ways. The exotic, the stylish, and the novel attracted her, while her mother sheathed herself in a cloak of humility and preferred a self-conscious austerity to any kind of display. Thus Doris’s very being seemed an affront to her mother, and the two clashed constantly. Leila’s occasional rages were no less fierce than before. Doris had become a pretty child. And “the prettier she got,” says Buffett, “the worse it was.”
Warren showed early signs of a knack with people, but was also the competitive, precocious child, intellectually aggressive yet physically retiring. When his parents got him boxing gloves at age eight, he took one lesson and never put them on again.3 He tried skating, but his ankles wobbled.4 He didn’t join in the street games with the other boys, even though he loved sports and was well-coordinated. The only exception to his aversion to hand-to-hand combat was Ping-Pong. When the Buffetts got a Ping-Pong table, he slammed away at it night and day against anyone who would take him on—his parents’ friends, kids from school—until he became a menace with the paddle. On the single occasion anyone remembers that called for fists, however, little Bertie went out and took care of things for him. He cried easily if anyone was mean to him; he worked hard to be liked and to get along well with others. Yet despite Warren’s cheerful demeanor, something about him struck his friends as lonely.
The Buffetts took a photograph of the three children at Christmas in 1937. Bertie seems happy. Doris looks wretched. Warren, clutching his favorite possession, a nickel-plated money changer, a gift from his aunt Alice, looks far