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Warren returned to Rosehill School and reunited with his friends. Every day he showed up around noontime at the house of his father’s former partner, Carl Falk, whose wife, Gladys, served him sandwiches and tomato soup and kindness for lunch. He “worshipped” Mrs. Falk15 as if she were a surrogate mother, just as he had done with his friend Jack Frost’s mother, Hazel, and with his aunts.

Though Warren was comfortable with all these middle-aged women, he was shy, hopelessly shy, and girls his own age terrified him. Even so, he soon developed a crush on Dorothy Hume, one of the girls in his new eighth-grade class. His friend Stu Erickson had a similar crush on Margie Lee Canady, and his other friend Byron Swanson had a crush on Joan Fugate. After weeks of talk, they worked themselves up to ask the girls to go to the movies.16 But when Warren walked over to Dorothy’s house to invite her, he chickened out when her father answered the door. Warren tried to sell him a magazine subscription instead. Finally, however, he managed to ask Dorothy, and she said yes.

On the appointed Saturday, Byron and Warren went together to pick up their dates because they were afraid to show up alone. Thus the afternoon started with a lengthy trudge from house to house to the streetcar stop, walking for blocks in uncomfortable silence. Margie Lee, who lived in the opposite direction, arrived at the stop with Stu and they all boarded the streetcar, where the boys stared red-faced at their shoes throughout the trip downtown as the girls chatted easily with one another. When they reached the theater, Margie Lee, Dorothy, and Joan strolled directly to a row of seats and sat down next to each other. The boys’ plan to cuddle up with the girls during two horror films, The Mummy’s Tomb and Cat People, instantly fell apart. Instead, they sat in their own group and watched the girls’ brunette heads huddled together as they giggled and shrieked through the weekly serials, the cartoons, and both movies. After a painful trip to Walgreen’s for after-movie treats, the boys retraced their trip on the streetcar in a dazed little group and began the long march to the girls’ houses before being dismissed by their dates. They had barely spoken a word the entire afternoon.17 All three were so mortified that it took each of them years thereafter to summon the courage to ask another girl out on a date.18

But while Warren lost heart, he did not lose interest; he next developed a crush on another girl in his class, Clo-Ann Kaul, a striking blonde. Yet she was not interested in him either; he seemed unable to make any headway at all with girls. His way of diverting himself from disappointment was, again, making money.

“My grandfather liked the idea that I was always thinking of ways to make money. I used to go around the neighborhood collecting wastepaper and magazines to sell for scrap. My aunt Alice would take me down to the collection drop-off, where you could get thirty-five cents for a hundred pounds, or something like that.”

At Ernest’s house, Warren read a shelf full of back issues of the Progressive Grocer. Subjects like “how to stock a meat department” fascinated him. On the weekends, Ernest put him to work at Buffett & Son, the empire over which he presided. About the size of a two-story garage, it had a Spanish-style tile roof that stood out in the pleasant upper-middle-class suburb of Dundee. The Buffetts had always sold on “credit and delivery.” Ladies or their cooks would ring up Walnut 0761 on the telephone and read their lists to clerks who took down their orders.19 Clerks rushed around the store, scrambling up and down a rolling wooden ladder that flew back and forth along the shelves, retrieving boxes, bags, and cans, and filling their baskets from the pyramids of vegetables and fruit. To cut a hand of bananas, they took down the wicked sharp knife next to a four-foot bunch of bananas that hung from a hook by the back door. They