The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [44]
His classmates noticed he was friendly but seemed shy, especially around girls.32 He was a year younger than most of them, born in August and having skipped a half grade at Rosehill. “I was out of whack. I felt very inept with girls at that time, and socially in general. But with older people, I was fine.”
Not long after the family’s arrival in Spring Valley, Howard’s friend Ed S. Miller—one of those older people—called from Omaha. He wanted to talk to Warren.
“‘Warren,’ he said, ‘I’m in a terrible jam. The board of directors told me to get rid of our Washington, D.C., warehouse. This is a real problem for me. We have hundreds of pounds—cases—of stale cornflakes and cases of Barbecubes dog biscuits. I’m in a real pickle. I’m twelve hundred miles away and you’re the only businessman I know in Washington.’
“So he said, ‘I know I can count on you. As a matter of fact, I told our warehouse men to deliver these cornflakes and Barbecubes dog biscuits to your house. Whatever you get for them, send me half; you keep the rest.’
“And all of a sudden, these huge trucks come up and fill our garage, fill our basement, everything! Now my dad couldn’t get the car in or anything.
“And now I’ve got these things.
“Well, I just tried to figure out who it would be useful to, you know. And obviously the dog biscuits would be useful to a kennel. The cornflakes were not fit for human consumption anymore, so I figured they might be good for some animal. I sold the cornflakes to some poultry guy. I made probably a hundred bucks for the merchandise.33 When I sent the fifty percent to Mr. Miller, he wrote back and said, ‘You saved my job.’
“There were some awfully nice people like that back in Omaha. I always liked to hang around with adults when I was a kid. Always. I would walk over to church or something, and then I would just drop in on people.
“My dad’s friends were very nice too. They had this Bible class and various things at the rectory, and they would come over to the house and play bridge afterward. All these guys were very, very nice to me; they all liked me and called me Warreny. I’d learned Ping-Pong from taking out books from the library and practicing at the Y. They knew I enjoyed playing with them down in the basement, and they’d take me on.
“I had all these things I was doing in Omaha. I had a nice niche there.
“When we moved to Washington, the Ping-Pong table disappeared. It was like my cornet. And the Boy Scouts. I was doing all these different things, but they all ended when we moved.
“So I was mad.
“But I didn’t know exactly how to direct that. I just knew I was having a whole lot less fun than I was having before my dad got elected.”
After his father took him to watch a couple of sessions of Congress, Warren decided he wanted to become a congressional page, but Howard was not in a position to pull that off. Instead, Warren got a job caddying at the Chevy Chase Club, but once again discovered that physical labor did not suit him. “My mother sewed towels inside my shirts because I was carrying these heavy bags around. Sometimes the golfers—mainly women golfers—would feel sorry for me and practically carry the things themselves.” He needed a job that better fit his skills and talents.
Almost from birth, like all the Buffetts, Warren had lived and breathed the news. He loved hearing it and now he would enter the business of delivering it and find he loved that too. He got himself hired to throw a paper route, delivering the