The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [33]
Wall Street in 1940 had begun to revive from the crash, yet remained a chastened place. The men of Wall Street were like a band of hardy mercenaries fighting on after most of their comrades had been felled in war. The way they made a living seemed vaguely disreputable with memories of the 1929 Crash so fresh in people’s minds. Yet even though they did not brag about it outside the bunker walls, some of these mercenaries were doing very well indeed. Howard Buffett took his son down to lower Manhattan and dropped in on the top man at one of the largest brokerage firms. Little Warren Buffett was getting a peek inside the bunker’s gold-plated doors.
“That’s when I met Sidney Weinberg, who was the most famous man on Wall Street. My dad had never met him. He had this little tiny firm out here in Omaha. But Mr. Weinberg let us in, maybe because a little kid was along or something. We talked for about thirty minutes.”
As the senior partner of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, Weinberg had spent a decade painstakingly repairing the firm’s reputation after its disgrace for misleading investors with a notorious pyramid scheme in the market crash of 1929.6 Warren knew nothing about that, nor that Weinberg grew up an immigrant’s child and had started as a porter’s assistant at Goldman, emptying cuspidors and brushing the partners’ silk hats.7 But he certainly understood that he was in the presence of a big shot once he found himself in Sidney Weinberg’s walnut-paneled office, its walls hung with original letters, documents, and portraits of Abraham Lincoln. And what Weinberg did at the end of their visit made a huge impression on him. “As I went out, he put his arm around me and he said, ‘What stock do you like, Warren?’
“He’d forgotten it all the next day, but I remembered it forever.”
Buffett would never forget that Weinberg, a big shot on Wall Street, had paid such attention to him and seemed to care about his opinion.8
From Goldman Sachs, Howard took Warren over to Broad Street and through a set of enormous Corinthian columns into the New York Stock Exchange. Here, in the temple of money, men in brightly colored jackets shouted and scribbled standing around wrought-iron trading posts while clerks darted back and forth, strewing the floor with paper scraps. Yet it was a scene from the Stock Exchange dining room that captured Warren’s imagination.
“We had lunch at the Exchange with a fellow named At Mol, a Dutchman, a member of the Stock Exchange and a very impressive-looking man. After lunch, a guy came along with a tray that had all these different kinds of tobacco leaves on it. He made up a cigar for Mr. Mol, who picked out the leaves that he wanted. And I thought, This is it. It doesn’t get any better than this. A custom-made cigar.”
A custom-made cigar. The visions that cigar evoked in Warren’s mathematical mind! He had exactly zero interest in smoking a cigar. But working backward, he saw what hiring a man for such a frivolous purpose implied. To justify the expense must mean that, even while most of the country was still mired in the Depression, the cigar man’s employer was making a great deal of money. He grasped it right away. The Stock Exchange must pour forth streams of money: rivers, fountains, cascades, torrents of money, enough to hire a man for the pure frippery of rolling cigars—handmade, custom-made cigars—for the Stock Exchange members’ own particular pleasure.
That day, as he beheld the cigar man, a vision of his future was planted.
He kept that vision when he went back to Omaha, old enough now to organize his quest and pursue it all the more systematically. Even as he followed the pastimes of an ordinary boy, playing basketball and Ping-Pong and collecting