The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [43]
Every morning, Howard took the streetcar that ran down Wisconsin Avenue to M Street in Georgetown, then turned down Pennsylvania Avenue. He got off near the old Executive Office Building and went to work in a Washington that heaved and roiled. The government and diplomatic community had ballooned, and the streets were packed with people in kilts and turbans and saris, with armies of clerical workers, and with a sea of uniformed military.
From time to time, black women in Sunday dresses and church hats picketed the Capitol to protest lynchings in the South. Air-raid wardens walked the neighborhoods to check that all houses had opaque blackout curtains. Once or twice a month the Buffetts were required to go down to their basement and turn out all the lights for a mandatory blackout drill.
Leila disliked Washington from the day she arrived. She was homesick for Omaha, and lonely too. Immersed in his new job, Howard had become a more distant husband and father. He worked at the office all day, then read the Congressional Record and legislative materials all evening. He spent Saturdays at the office and often returned there on Sunday afternoons after church.
Doris now attended Woodrow Wilson High School, where again she fell in right away with the popular crowd. Bertie, too, made friends easily, finding a compatible group of girls in the neighborhood. Warren’s experience was nothing like his sisters’. He enrolled at Alice Deal Junior High School,30 which sat atop the highest hill in Washington, overlooking Spring Valley, the black school in the hollow behind it, and the rest of the city below.
The students in his class—many of them diplomats’ kids—were a world more polished than Warren and his now-lost friends from Rosehill School. At first, he had difficulty making friends. He went out for basketball and football, but since he wore glasses and was timid in physical contact sports, neither was a success. “I’d been pulled away from my friends and I wasn’t making new friends. I was young for my class. I was not poised at all. I wasn’t a terrible athlete, but I wasn’t a great athlete in the least, so that was not an entry ticket. And Doris and Bertie were knockouts, so they did fine. A good-looking girl does not have trouble, because the world will adjust to her. So they both fit in better than I did, far better, which was a little irritating too.”
His grades started out at Cs and Bs and improved to As, except in English. “Mostly my grades related to how I felt about the teachers. I hated my English teacher, Miss Allwine.31 Music class was also Cs all the way through.” Miss Baum, the music teacher, was the best-looking teacher in the school. Most of the boys had crushes on her, but Warren had real difficulties with Miss Baum, who reported that he needed to improve in cooperation, courtesy, and self-reliance.
“I was the youngest one in the class. I was interested in girls, and I wasn’t avoiding them, but I felt I had less poise. The girls were way ahead of me socially. When I left Omaha, nobody in my class was dancing. When I moved to Washington, everybody had been dancing for a year or two. So I never caught up, in effect.”
The Buffetts’ move when Warren was twelve had deprived him of a crucial experience: Addie Fogg’s dancing class. At the American Legion hall in Omaha on Friday nights, Addie Fogg, a short, stout woman of middle age, lined the boys and girls up by height and paired them off, boys in bow ties and girls in stiff petticoats. They practiced the fox trot and box-step waltz. A boy learned