The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [36]
“Then we made this little fifteen-minute radio program. My mother played the organ; my father introduced us: ‘There’s Doris, age fourteen. And there’s Warren, age eleven.’ And my line was ‘Just a second, Pop, I’m reading the sports section.’ Then, the three of us sang ‘America the Beautiful’ while my mother played this little organ.”
It was no stemwinder, but “With that fifteen-minute radio program, everybody started volunteering. Still, the other guy had been in for four terms.”
Even with the help of volunteers, Howard struggled against the political handicaps of his pessimism and his literal honesty. Thus, the Buffett political platform bulged with dire warnings and bristled at the mindless social conformity observable everywhere in the 1940s Midwest. Howard demanded that voters “buy one-way tickets out of Washington for all of the screwballs, stuffed shirts, stool pigeons, sleepwalkers, and society snobs.”
This fire-breathing rhetoric belied a sweetness in him, a subtle wit, and a certain innocence. For years, Howard had carried in his pocket a handwritten piece of paper, softened and worn to the texture of linen, which said, “I am God’s child. I am in His Hands. As for my body—it was never meant to be permanent. As for my soul—it is immortal. Why, then, should I be afraid of anything?”3
Unfortunately for his only son, when it came to the streets of Omaha, Howard meant this almost literally.
When campaigning, he would roust Warren, now twelve years old, out of bed long before dawn, to head down to the stockyards in South Omaha. Along with the railroads, these were Omaha’s main business, employing almost twenty thousand people, mostly immigrants. More than eight million animals a year4 lumbered into a metropolis of meat and rolled out as billions of pounds of packaged goods.5 South Omaha once was a separate city, a short distance from downtown geographically but culturally a continent away. For decades it had served as the brewing ground for most of the city’s ethnic and racial unrest.
Warren planted his sneakers at one end of the block, hands clenched and eyes fixed anxiously on his father. Howard limped from a childhood bout with polio, and the family worried about his heart condition. Warren’s stomach churned as he watched his father down the street, approaching huge, cleaver-faced men in overalls on their way into the packinghouses for the five-thirty a.m. shift.
Many of them did not speak English at home. The least well off, the blacks and new immigrants, lived crammed into a buffer zone of boardinghouses and shanties next to the yards. Those with greater savvy and more means had worked their way out into the ethnic parishes nearby, living in neat small houses with steeply pitched roofs that rolled up and down South Omaha’s hills: Czechs in Little Bohemia, Serbs and Croats in Goose Hollow, the Poles in G Town (the former Greek Town); the Greeks were long gone, their homes destroyed in a 1909 anti-immigrant riot.
The people whom Howard approached ranged from the top rank of workers, the specialized butchers from the killing gang who worked on the highest floor of the slaughterhouse, to those on the lower floors, in the boneyard, the lard department, and the fertilizing department. A handful of women trimmed pork, twisted wieners, painted and labeled cans, plucked chickens, and sorted eggs. Management especially prized black women, who could be counted on to fill offal room jobs, and for less pay than whites.6 They cleaned the “pluck”—intestines, bladder, hearts, glands, and other organs—their hands immersed