The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [29]
Leila’s determination that they appear to be the perfect Norman Rockwell family hardened when Warren was eight and new calamities befell the Stahls. Her mother, Stella, had deteriorated, and the family admitted her to the Norfolk State Hospital, formerly the Nebraska State Insane Asylum, where Leila’s grandmother had died.5 Her sister Edie spent three months in the hospital and nearly died of peritonitis after suffering a ruptured appendix. Afterward, she made up her mind to go ahead and get married, and wed a man of questionable background who made her laugh. This did not improve Leila’s dim view of her sister, who had always seemed to her more interested in adventure than duty.
Meanwhile, Howard had been elected to the school board, a new role that became a point of pride in the family.6 Amid this mixture of Buffett progress and Stahl backsliding, Warren spent most of his time away from home, out of his mother’s way. He paid calls around the neighborhood, made friends with other people’s parents, and listened to political talk at their houses.7 As he roamed, he began collecting bottle caps. He went to filling stations all over town, scooping bottle caps out of the wells beneath the ice chests where they had fallen after customers popped their sodas open. Down in the Buffetts’ basement, the piles of bottle caps grew: Pepsi, root beer, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. He became obsessed with collecting bottle caps. All this free information was lying around untouched—and no one wanted it! He found it amazing. After dinner, he spread his collection of bottle caps on newspapers all over the living-room floor, sorting and counting, sorting and counting.8 The numbers told him which soft drinks were most popular. But he also enjoyed sorting and counting as a way of relaxing. When he wasn’t working on his bottle caps, he liked sorting and counting his coin collection and his collection of stamps.
School for the most part bored him. In Miss Thickstun’s fourth-grade class with Bob Russell and his other friend Stu Erickson, to pass the time, he played math games and counted in his head. He liked geography, however, and found spelling exciting, especially the “spell-downs,” in which six students from the first grade competed with six from the second. Whoever won advanced and competed with the third graders, and so on. Theoretically, a first grader could win six times and eventually beat a sixth grader. “I wanted to pass Doris on the spell-downs, and Bertie wanted to pass me.” Alas, all three Buffetts were very smart kids, and neither happened. “Still, there was nothing like that for capturing our attention.”
Warren enjoyed spell-downs, but nothing motivated him like blackboard arithmetic. From the second grade on, students raced to the board, two at a time. First they competed at sums against the clock, then subtraction, finally multiplication and division, tallying their numbers down the board. Warren, Stu, and Russ were the brightest in the class. At first they scored about the same, but over time Warren pulled ahead a little. And then, with practice, a little more.9
Finally one day Miss Thickstun asked Warren and Stu to stay after school. Warren’s heart pounded in his chest. “We wondered what the hell we had done,” Stu says. Instead of a scolding, Miss Thickstun told Warren and Stu to move their books from the 4A section on one side of the room to the 4B section on the other.10 They were skipping half a grade. Bob Russell was left behind, even though Mr. Russell got upset and complained.
Warren stayed friends with both, but kept his relationships with them separate: As before, although each was a friend of his, they were never really friends with each other.
Warren’s fondness for minutiae continued to develop. His parents and their friends—who called him “Warreny”—got a kick out of his party trick of naming state capitals. By fifth grade he had immersed himself in the 1939 World Almanac, which quickly became his favorite book. He memorized the population of every city. He got a contest going