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Prompted by Carol Loomis, Fortune took up the issue in a cover story: “Should You Leave It All to the Children?” Family comes first, many people said.

“My kids are going to carve out their own place in the world and they know that I’m for them, whatever they want to do,” Buffett said. But “just because they came out of the right womb,” setting them up with a trust fund—which he considered “a lifetime supply of food stamps”—could be “harmful” and an “antisocial act.”31 This was the rational Buffett. This Buffett had once written to a friend when his children were toddlers that he wanted to see “what the tree has produced” before deciding what to do about giving them money.32

Nevertheless, Buffett had made a decision that demonstrated newfound—if slight—flexibility. In 1981, he set up an innovative program in which Berkshire Hathaway would contribute $2 per share to a charity of the shareholder’s choice. Berkshire did not pay a dividend, but this program allowed the shareholders to direct how the company spent its charitable dollars rather than letting top management donate to its pet causes and receive the credit. The program did not allocate much money, but for Buffett to do it at all was a loosening of the fist. And the shareholders loved it. The participation rate in the program was always close to one hundred percent.

To Buffett, the collector of information, the contributions program also turned out to be a tiny gold mine. It gave him an insight into the philanthropic interests of each shareholder, which he could never have gotten any other way. Collecting this information had no purpose whatsoever—even less than collecting nuns’ fingerprints. Buffett, however, was insatiably curious and had a deep interest in knowing about his shareholders as individuals, as if they were part of an extended family, which was how he thought of them.

At fifty-three, Buffett—who had already “retired” twice—was thinking through issues of philanthropy and inheritance. The subject that visibly unnerved him was retirement. He joked about working after he was dead and made a point of highlighting elderly managers like Gene Abegg and Ben Rosner. But now they had retired, and Lou Vincenti had Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that Warren’s next move would be to strike a deal with an eighty-nine-year-old woman, one who would outlast anyone he had ever met.

44

Rose

Omaha • 1983

Rose Gorelick Blumkin came to Omaha from the tiny village of Shchedrin, in the region of Minsk. Born in 1893, she and her seven brothers slept on straw on the bare floor of a two-room log house because her rabbi father couldn’t afford to buy them a mattress.

“I dreamed all my life, since I was six years old,” she said. “The first dream of mine was to go to America.

“In Russia, they used to have pogroms against the Jews. They’d cut up the pregnant women and take out the kids. They’d tear up their fathers and then have a dance in the main market. I was six years old when I found out about that. I said, I’m going to America when I grow up.”1

At thirteen, Rose walked barefoot for eighteen miles to the nearest train station to save the leather soles of her brand-new shoes. She had the equivalent of four cents in her pocket and hid under a train seat for three hundred miles to save her money, until she reached the closest town, Gomel. There she knocked on twenty-six doors until the owner of a dry-goods store responded to her proposition. “I’m not a beggar,” the four-foot-ten-inch girl said. “I’ve got four cents in my pocket. Let me sleep in your house and I’ll show you how good I am.” The next morning, “When I came to work I waited on customer. I rolled out the material and I added it up before anybody picked up a pencil. And at twelve o’clock he asked me if I was going to stay.”2

By age sixteen, she was a manager, supervising six married men. “Don’t worry about the men, Mamma!” she wrote her mother. “They all mind me!”3 Four years later she married Isadore Blumkin, a shoe salesman