The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [313]
“He was such a sweet guy,” says Buffett, “and he killed himself with drugs.” The shock of losing a family member in a sordid overdose at a rooming house would reverberate for years. When Rogers died, Doris says, “That was the worst sorrow that Susie ever went through.” She had not only lost the nephew she had loved like a son. After so many years, all her efforts to try to save him had come to naught. She had never suffered such a defeat.
Warren admired his wife’s desire to rescue people and her skill in helping those in need. Billy Rogers was only one of many she had befriended through the years. Some of them had done damage to themselves through terrible choices, others were victims of bad luck—though few came to such a terrible end. As “Mama Susie,” she made it her mission to help people one at a time. Warren called her a “retailer.” The emotional opening-up of this one-on-one work was beyond him. Rather, he chose to leverage his brains and money to affect as many lives as possible; he considered himself a “wholesaler.” His way of connecting to people was through his role as a teacher. But he was no longer teaching his courses at the University of Omaha, and his most attentive students, Kay and Don Graham, had become thoroughly Buffettized. His most important seminar, the Buffett Group meetings, took place only in odd-numbered years. Buffett enjoyed teaching so much that he actually went looking for an audience.
In 1980, he agreed to testify in a major antitrust lawsuit against IBM, the most famous case of its era. Another witness, Arjay Miller, a fellow Post director, testified reluctantly; he found being grilled by lawyers, before a judge who impressed him as hating IBM, a miserable experience. Buffett, however, enjoyed showing his expertise; he relished putting it to the test before lawyers. He put his all into the testimony. “He’s a great testifier,” says Miller.35 Buffett was especially pleased that his testimony became part of the record in a landmark case in American business history.
Buffett’s earliest teachings had been preserved in the letters he had written to his former partners in the 1960s, letters that were photocopied and passed hand to hand around Wall Street until the copies became blurry and hard to read. Ever since 1977, with the help of Carol Loomis, his unusual chairman’s letters to his shareholders in the Berkshire annual reports—carefully crafted, enlightening, eye-opening letters—had grown more personal and entertaining by the year; they amounted to a crash course in business, written in clear language that ranged from biblical quotations to references to Alice in Wonderland and princesses kissing toads. Much of their acreage was devoted to discussions of matters other than Berkshire Hathaway’s financial results—how to think about investing, the harm the dismal economy was doing to business, how businesses should measure results. These letters brought out both the preacher and the cop in Buffett, giving people a sense of him as a man. And the man was charming, he was attractive; his investors wanted more of him. So he gave it to them at the shareholder meetings.
The earliest meetings had taken place in Seabury Stanton’s old loft above the New Bedford mill. Two or three people with Ben Graham connections came because of Buffett. One was Conrad Taff, who had taken Graham’s class. Buffett wanted his shareholder meetings to be open and democratic, as unlike the old Marshall-Wells meeting as possible. Taff peppered Buffett with questions, and Buffett enjoyed it, as if he were sitting in an armchair at a party with people