The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [32]
Though he found Wendell Willkie too liberal for his personal tastes, Howard felt, Anyone to get rid of Roosevelt. Warren, who followed along with his father’s political views, enjoyed showing off his Willkie–McNary buttons at the stadium. Then his manager called him into the office and said, “Take those off. You’ll get a reaction from the Roosevelt people.”
Warren put the buttons in his apron, where some of the dimes and nickels got wedged inside the backs of the pins. When he reported in after the game, his manager told him to dump out the contents of the pocket, pins and all. Then he swept them off the counter and took them away. “That was my introduction to Business 101,” Buffett says. “I was pretty sad.” And when Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term, the Buffetts were sadder still.
But while politics was Howard’s main interest and money a sideline, for his son, those interests were reversed. Warren hung around his father’s office at the grand old Omaha National Bank building every chance he got, reading “The Trader” column in Barron’s and the books on his father’s bookshelf. He planted himself in the customers’ room of Harris Upham & Co. At this regional stockbroking firm, down two flights of stairs from Howard’s office, he found it the height of glamour to be allowed to “mark the board,” chalking stock prices on a slow Depression-era Saturday morning. The market still traded for a two-hour session on weekends. Root-bound men with nothing better to do filled the semi-circle of chairs in the customers’ room, listlessly watching numbers crawl by on the Trans-Lux, an electronic display of prices of major stocks.4 Occasionally somebody would jump up and rip a handful of tape off the lazily clicking ticker machine. Warren arrived with his paternal great-uncle Frank Buffett—the family misanthrope who had been brokenhearted over losing Henrietta, now long dead, to his brother Ernest—and his maternal great-uncle John Barber.5 Each man was enslaved by his long-standing habit of thinking in only one direction.
“Uncle Frank was a total bear on the world, and Uncle John was a total bull. I would sit between the two of them, and they’d sort of vie for my attention and try to sell me that they were right. They didn’t like each other, so they wouldn’t talk to each other, but they would talk to me in between. My great-uncle Frank thought everything in the world was going to go broke.
“And when somebody’d go up there to the counter behind the chairs and say, ‘I want to buy a hundred shares of U.S. Steel at twenty-three,’ my uncle Frank would always boom out and say, ‘U.S. STEEL? IT’S GOING TO ZERO!’” That was not good for business. “They couldn’t throw him out, but they hated him around this place. It was not an office designed for short-sellers.”
Snug between his two great-uncles, Warren stared at the numbers, which were fuzzy. His trouble reading the Trans-Lux led to his family’s discovery that he was nearsighted. After being fitted for glasses, Warren noticed that the numbers seemed to change according to some immutable law of their own. Although his great-uncles were both eager to sway him to their respective—and extreme—points of view, Warren noticed that their opinions appeared to have no connection whatsoever to the numbers passing overhead on the Trans-Lux. He was determined to figure out the pattern, but as yet did not know how.
“My uncle Frank and my uncle John would vie for who would take me to lunch, because that was sort of beating the other guy. With my uncle Frank, we’d go down to the old Paxton Hotel, where we could buy day-old food for a quarter.”
Warren, who enjoyed spending time with adults, relished being vied over by his uncles. Actually, he enjoyed being vied over by anyone. He craved attention from his other relatives and his parents’ friends, but especially from his father.
Howard gave each of his children an East Coast trip at age ten, an important event in their lives. Warren knew