The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [45]
Warren started delivering in Spring Valley, near his home. “The first year, the houses were far apart, which I was not too keen on. You had to deliver it every day, including Christmas Day. On Christmas morning, the family had to wait until I had done my paper route. When I was sick, my mom delivered the papers, but I handled the money. I had these jars in my room with half dollars and quarters.34 Then he added an afternoon route to his workload.
“The Evening Star, which was owned by this blue-blooded Washington family, was the dominant paper in town.”
In the afternoons, he rolled down the streets on his bike, grabbing copies of the Star to throw from the huge basket on the front. Near the end of the route he had to steel himself. “On Sedgwick was this terrible dog.
“I liked to work by myself, where I could spend my time thinking about things I wanted to think about. Washington was upsetting at first, but I was in my own world all the time. I could be sitting in a room thinking, or I could be riding around flinging things and thinking.”
The thoughts he was thinking were angry thoughts. He spent his days acting them out at Alice Deal Junior High. Bertie Backus, Alice Deal’s principal, prided herself on knowing each pupil by name. She soon had special reason to know Warren Buffett’s.
“I was kind of behind when I got there, and then I fell further behind. I was just mad at the world. I did a lot of daydreaming, and I was always charting things—I would bring stock charts to school and just wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in class. Then I got to be friends with John McRae and Roger Bell. And I became disruptive.”
The pleasing personality of his childhood all but disappeared. In one class, Warren enlisted John McRae to play chess with him while the teacher was talking, just to be obnoxious. In another class, he cut open a golf ball, which squirted some sort of liquid onto the ceiling.
The boys had started to golf. John McRae’s father worked as a greenskeeper at Tregaron, a famous estate close to downtown Washington that belonged to heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Joseph E. Davies, who was ambassador to Russia. The family had dozens of servants and was almost never home, so the boys went over and played on the nine-hole golf course. Then Warren convinced Roger and John to run away with him to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they were going to try to get jobs caddying at a well-known golf course.35 “We hitchhiked. And after we had successfully gone a hundred fifty miles or so, we made it to Hershey and stopped at this hotel and we made the mistake of bragging to the bellboy.
“The next morning, when we came down, there was this huge highway patrolman waiting for us, who took us down to the highway patrol headquarters.
“We just started lying. And we lied and lied and lied about having our parents’ permission. All the while there was this Teletype machine spitting out alerts about this and that. I was sitting there thinking that pretty soon there was going to be an alert from Washington, D.C., and this guy will know we’re lying. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”
Somehow they lied convincingly enough that the patrolman let them go.36 “We started walking toward Gettysburg or someplace. We were having no luck hitchhiking, and then a trucker picked us up and stuffed all three of us into the cab.” They were so scared by then, they only wanted to go home. “The trucker stopped at a diner in Baltimore and divided us up with other truckers. It was getting dark and we felt like we’d never get out of there alive, but they took us back to Washington, separately. Roger