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But on the second dum, he hit a wrong note.

“My whole life flashed before my eyes, because I didn’t know what to do with the echo. They hadn’t prepared me for this. Paralyzed—my big moment.”

Should he copy the other trumpet player’s mistake or embarrass him by contradicting what he’d played? Warren was undone. The scene scalded itself permanently into his memory—except for what he did next. Years later, which course he followed—assuming he played any note at all—had become a blank.

He had learned a lesson: It might seem easier to go through life as the echo—but only until the other guy plays a wrong note.

8

A Thousand Ways

Omaha • 1939–1942

The first few cents Warren Buffett ever earned came from selling packs of chewing gum. And from the day he started selling—at six years of age—he showed an unyielding attitude toward his customers that revealed much about his later style.

“I had this little green tray, which had five different areas in it. I’m pretty sure my aunt Edie gave me that. It had containers for five different brands of gum, Juicy Fruit, Spearmint, Doublemint, and so on. I would buy packs of gum from my grandfather and go around door to door in the neighborhood selling this stuff. I used to do that in the evening, largely.1

“I remember a woman named Virginia Macoubrie saying, ‘I’ll take one stick of Juicy Fruit.’ I said, ‘We don’t break up packs of gum’—I mean, I’ve got my principles. I still, to this day, remember Mrs. Macoubrie saying she wanted one stick. No, they were sold only in five-stick packs. They were a nickel, and she wanted to spend a penny with me.”

Making a sale was tempting, but not tempting enough to change his mind. If he sold one stick to Virginia Macoubrie, he would have four sticks left to sell to somebody else, not worth the work or the risk. From each whole pack, he made two cents profit. He could hold those pennies, weighty and solid, in his palm. They became the first few snowflakes in a snowball of money to come.

What Warren was willing to break up were red cartons of Coca-Cola, which he sold door to door on summer nights. He carried on selling them during family vacations, approaching sunbathers around the shores of Lake Okoboji in Iowa. Soda pop was more profitable than chewing gum: He netted a nickel for every six bottles, and stuffed these coins proudly into the ball-park-style nickel-plated money changer on his belt. He also wore it when he went door to door selling copies of the Saturday Evening Post and Liberty magazines.

The money changer made him feel professional. It emblemized the part of selling that Warren most enjoyed: collecting. Although he now collected bottle caps, coins, and stamps, mainly, he collected cash. He kept his coins at home in a drawer, sometimes adding to the $20 his father had given him when he turned six, all recorded in a little maroon passbook—his first bank account.

By the time he was nine or ten, he and Stu Erickson were selling used golf balls at Elmwood Park golf course—until somebody reported them and they got kicked out by the cops. When the police talked to Warren’s parents, however, Howard and Leila weren’t concerned. They just considered their son ambitious. As the Buffetts’ only—and precocious—son, Warren had a sort of “halo,” according to his sisters, and got away with a hell of a lot.2

At age ten, he got a job selling peanuts and popcorn at the University of Omaha football games. He walked through the stands yelling, “Peanuts, popcorn, five cents, a nickel, half dime, fifth of a quarter, get your peanuts and popcorn here!” The 1940 presidential election campaign was under way, and he had collected dozens of different Willkie–McNary buttons, which he wore on his shirt. His favorite read: “Washington Wouldn’t, Cleveland Couldn’t, Roosevelt Shouldn’t,” which referred to FDR’s outrageous—to the Buffetts—decision to run for a third term. While the U.S. had no constitutional term limit, the country had—so far—rebuffed the idea of an “imperial President.”3 Howard felt that