The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [286]
He was equally loath to lose Ben Rosner, who had finally retired from Associated Cotton Shops. Rosner’s underlings had made fun of his toilet-paper-pickin’ ways. Sure enough, as soon as they took charge, Associated fell into the tank. For months, Verne McKenzie slogged back and forth to New York’s garment district, peddling its soggy carcass.10 Finally, he found some buyer willing to pay half a million dollars to haul away the remains of a business that only recently had earned Berkshire as much as $2 million a year.
A few of the Berkshire companies were so self-steering that it was hard to tell the difference between a well-run business and one guided by the wind alone. At Wesco, Lou Vincenti, who resisted being managed, succeeded in concealing his Alzheimer’s from Buffett and Munger for several years.
“We didn’t see him that often,” says Buffett, “and he would sort of get himself psyched up to try and get past that. Plus, we didn’t want to see it. Charlie and I loved him so much we didn’t want to face it.”
“Lou Vincenti was decisive, he was intelligent, and he was honest and shrewd,” says Munger. “And he ran the last savings and loan in California to go to a computer-run system for depositor’s accounts, because it was still cheaper to do it manually with community-college students working as part-time employees. You can see how that would turn Warren and me on. He was cranky and independent and a very good human being. And we loved him so much that even after we found out, we kept him in his job until the week that he went off to the Alzheimer’s home. He liked coming in, and he wasn’t doing us any harm.”11
Buffett and Munger turned this story into a jokey parable, saying that they wanted more businesses that could be run successfully by a manager with Alzheimer’s.
Buffett was sensitive to the subject of Alzheimer’s. He took great pride in his powerful memory; now his mother grew forgetful. Her state of mind could be obscured by the way that Leila had always tended to live in the past, and to create her own ideal reality—her version of Buffett’s bathtub memory, in which—whoosh—the plug popped up, and bad memories drained away. Now in her late seventies, her son’s glory was her major joy, but Warren still trembled if he had to spend time with her. It was no wonder, since the old rages still flared up occasionally. By now, virtually every member of the family had had the experience of picking up the phone and hearing her wrath come scorching over the line. Her victims all ran for comfort to Susie, who said, “You have to understand that this just happens sometimes, to other people and not just you. Warren and Doris went through it for years. So just don’t focus on what she said, because it’s not true.”12
Peter was one grandchild whom Leila had always left alone. She sometimes commented that he looked like Howard and had a way of walking like Howard, so possibly that was why. The resemblance was only in appearance, however. Peter had dropped out of Stanford not long before graduation and married Mary Lullo, a recently divorced woman six years his senior who had four-year-old twin girls, Nicole and Erica. Peter treated them as his own daughters, they began using the name Buffett, and they became great favorites of Big Susie’s. Warren had been trying to interest Peter in Berkshire for some time and eventually sent his protégé, Susie’s former tennis buddy, Dan Grossman, to talk to him about working in the business, but Peter had no interest; his future lay in music.13 He cashed in $30,000 of his Berkshire stock to finance a recording and music production company, Independent Sound, scoring commercials out of his apartment in San