The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [42]
“I would sit there at night, or late afternoon, early evening, and my grandfather would dictate this to me. I’d write it on the back of old ledger sheets because we never wasted anything at Buffett and Son. He thought that it was the book all America was waiting for. I mean, there wasn’t any sense writing another book. Not Gone with the Wind or anything like that. Why would anybody want to read Gone with the Wind when they could be reading How to Run a Grocery Store and a Few Things I Learned about Fishing?”27
Warren loved it all, or almost all. He was so glad to be back in Omaha and reunited with his aunt, grandfather, and friends that he almost forgot about Washington for a while.
A few months later, the rest of the family made the three-day drive to Nebraska for the summer and moved into a rented house. Their finances were becoming stretched. Heretofore, the stockyards had simply been the home of some of Howard’s constituents. But when their reek drifted through town every time the wind blew from the south, everybody in Omaha knew—that was the smell of money. Howard now bought the South Omaha Feed Company to supplement his Congressional salary. And Warren went to work for his father.
“South Omaha Feed was a huge warehouse that seemed hundreds of feet long and had no air-conditioning. My job was to carry fifty-pound sacks of animal feed from a freight car into the warehouse. You can’t imagine how big a freight car looks when you get inside and it is packed to the top. And a freight car in the summer, that is really something. There was a guy named Frankie Zick who was tossing these things around. He was a weight lifter. I had on a short-sleeved shirt because it was so hot, and struggling to sort of get these feed bags into my arms and drag them. By noon my arms were kind of a bloody mess. That job lasted for about three hours. I just walked over to the streetcar and went home. Manual labor is for the birds.”
Before the summer ended, the family took a short vacation at Lake Okoboji. As they were leaving, Doris discovered that Warren had traded in her bicycle. But through some miscarriage of family justice, again he suffered no consequences. Indeed, when summer ended and his parents forced Warren, sullen and grim-faced, onto a train headed back to Washington, the new bicycle he had bought for himself with his filched funds went along. Doris was furious. But the theft of her bicycle only marked the beginning of her brother’s descent into behavior that would ultimately force his parents to take action.
Back in Washington, the Buffetts moved into the Fitchous’ house, an attractive two-story white colonial with a mimosa tree in the yard in the sophisticated Washington suburb of Spring Valley, right off Massachusetts Avenue. A restricted community*6 built in 1930 for the “socially and officially prominent,” Spring Valley was designed as a little “colony of outstanding personages.”28 The homes ranged from gigantic stone Tudor mansions to white two-story clapboard colonials like the Buffetts’ house. Leila had paid $17,500 for it, including some furniture. Warren got the front bedroom. The families on either side had sons, all older than Warren. Across the street lived the Keavneys, and Warren, now thirteen years old, developed a crush on Mrs. Keavney, the nearest motherly middle-aged woman in sight. “I was nuts about her,” he says.
The neighborhood had an international feel; it teemed with diplomats. The WAVES,29 women members of the wartime Navy, were headquartered at the nearby huge Gothic-style campus of American University. The Buffetts began adjusting to wartime life in Washington, a very different place from Omaha. The country had finally become prosperous, the Depression over, but with wartime rationing on, money mattered less and less. Everyday life was measured in points and coupons: 48 blue points a month for canned goods; 64 red points for perishables; coupons for meat,