The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [30]
One evening, however, Warren was distracted from his Almanac and his bottle caps by a terrible pain in his belly. The doctor made a house call, then went home to bed. But he couldn’t get the house call out of his mind, so he returned and sent Warren to the hospital. Later that night, Warren underwent surgery for a ruptured appendix.
The doctor had almost been too late. Warren lay gravely ill in the Catholic-run hospital for several weeks. But cared for by the nursing sisters, he soon found the hospital was a comforting haven. As he began to recover, other pleasures came his way. The World Almanac was brought for him to study. His teacher made all the girls in his class write him get-well letters.12 His aunt Edie, who understood her nephew well, brought him a toy fingerprinting kit. He knew exactly what to do with it. He coaxed each of the sisters into stopping by his room. He inked all of their fingers, got a set of prints, and filed this collection away carefully upon returning home. His family found this behavior entertaining. Who would want a set of nuns’ fingerprints? But Warren theorized that one of the sisters might eventually commit a crime. And if that happened, then only he, Warren Buffett, would own the clues to the culprit’s identity.13
Not long after his hospitalization, on an exceptionally cold and windy day in May 1939, his parents told him to get dressed. Then his grandfather appeared. Clad in a dignified single-breasted suit, a handkerchief tucked neatly in his breast pocket, Ernest Peabody Buffett looked the picture of respectability, like the president of the Rotary that he was.
Ernest had a way with children, despite his stern air, and he liked to entertain his grandchildren. Bertie worshipped him. “We’re going to Chicago today, Warren,” he announced. They boarded a train and went to see the Cubs play the Brooklyn Dodgers in what turned out to be a marathon baseball game that went scoreless for ten extra innings, tied nine to nine, and was finally called on account of darkness. It had lasted for four hours and forty-one minutes.14 After this exciting introduction to major-league baseball, Warren was thrilled when Ernest bought him a twenty-five-cent book about the 1938 baseball season. Warren memorized it. “That was the most precious book to me,” he says. “I knew every player’s history from every team and could have told you clearly every word in that book. I knew it in my sleep.”
His aunt Alice introduced him to another new interest when she gave him a book about bridge—probably Culbertson’s Contract Bridge Complete: The New Gold Book of Bidding and Play.15 Contract bridge—a social, psychological game in which figuring out the problem is as important as solving it—was sweeping the country at the time, and Warren found it suited him more than chess.16
Yet another of his many interests was music. For several years, he had been learning to play the cornet; among his heroes were the trumpet players Bunny Berigan and Harry James. Although music practice meant spending time at home with his mother, trying to please someone who could never be pleased, he persisted, and there came a time, after many painful hours of practice peppered with Leila’s criticism, that he was rewarded by being chosen to participate in his school’s Armistice Day ceremony.
Each year on November 11, the anniversary of the treaty that ended World War I, the entire Rosehill student body went down to the gym for a ceremony honoring the war’s dead heroes. In what had become a school tradition, trumpet players stationed at doors on either side of the gym would alternate playing “Taps,” one blowing the first dum da dum notes, and the other echoing dum da DUM, and so on.
That year, Warren’s cornet skills had advanced enough for him to be given the part of the echo. He woke up the morning of the event, exhilarated at the prospect of performing in front of the entire school. When the big moment came, he was ready.
As Warren stood in the doorway with his