The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [282]
Munger’s viewpoint as he wrote these words and steered Blue Chip through the legal maze of the Buffalo Evening News could not have been helped by the dire and dark condition of his health. For several years he had stoically tolerated growing cataracts, until they reached the point at which his eyesight was seriously impaired. When he had cataract surgery on his left eye, it resulted in an extremely rare complication called an epithelial downgrowth: A specialized type of primary body tissue from outside the eye (probably corneal cells) got inside his eye and started growing like a cancer. The pressure and destruction of the optic nerve caused severe, disabling pain.40 When he could no longer tolerate the agony of his slowly exploding eye, Munger arranged to have it eviscerated and replaced with a glass eye. But afterward, “I was like a wounded animal for several days.”41 He could not stand up to be bathed by the nurses because he was so nauseated from the pain. He told Buffett that he wanted to die. Terrified of going through another such ordeal and facing the possibility of blindness, he decided to have the remaining cataract in his right eye scraped off without replacing the lens. Instead, he wore old-fashioned cataract glasses, thick as a jellyfish, over his “good” eye.
During Munger’s ordeal, the Buffalo Evening News’s drivers’ union—perhaps emboldened after three years with new management running the place under duress—demanded overtime for work not performed. The Evening News had been paying this in a temporary capitulation; now the union wanted it as part of its permanent contract. Munger and Buffett said not a chance. Then in December 1980, the Teamsters, figuring that Buffett couldn’t take a strike while the battle with the Courier-Express dragged on, walked out at six a.m. after an all-night mediation attempt failed. Working with other unions, who crossed the picket line, Lipsey, Henry Urban, and Murray Light worked feverishly to get out the evening paper. Then, at the last minute, the pressmen walked off the job, pulling the page plates off the presses as they went.
Buffett figured he was sunk. From his decades of background in newspaper circulation, he knew that, even more than the pressmen, the tiny drivers’ union—all of thirty-eight employees—had the power to shut the paper down. Other unions and volunteers could run the presses, but without the drivers to distribute the newspapers, the paper was dead. Buffett would not use nonunion replacements, concerned for their safety. “I was not going to send our people out in December, in the dark, dropping papers in some rural area where some guy can hit them with a tire iron. I was sitting there in Omaha, and that’s not a decision I was going to make for a bunch of people who were going to have the hell beat out of them.”
The Evening News closed its doors.
Buffett told the union that the paper “has a limited amount of ‘blood,’ and if it bleeds too much, it will not live anymore…. We’re going to reopen only if there is a reasonable prospect of a viable operation.”42 That tipping point could quickly be reached.43
This time, the unions blinked. Within forty-eight hours, the Evening News was back on the streets. By then, the News, though still trailing on Sundays, had gained some ground on the Courier-Express and was crawling slowly toward the lead while maintaining its weekday advantage.44 By the end of 1981, Lipsey and Buffett had cut the losses to $1.5 million a year, half of what the Courier-Express was suffering.45 In a war of “survival of the fattest,” it was almost certain to win—albeit at a staggering price. The Courier-Express had never given up the lawsuit trying to reinstate Judge Brieant’s injunction,