The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [46]
He had made another friend by then, Lou Battistone; but, as in Omaha, he had kept his friendship with Lou separate from his relationship with Roger and John. Meanwhile, Warren was doing worse than ever at school. His grades dropped to Cs and Ds and even D minuses: in English, in history, in freehand drawing, in music, even Cs in mathematics.37 “Some of these grades were from the classes where I was supposedly good.” Warren’s teachers found him stubborn, rude, and lazy.38 Some of the teachers gave him double black Xs, for extra bad. His behavior was shocking for the times. In the 1940s, children did what they were told and obeyed their teachers. “I was going downhill fast. My parents were dying, they were dying.”
He excelled in only one class, and that was typing. Washington was fighting the war on paper, and typing was considered a critical skill.
At Alice Deal, typing was taught by placing black covers over the keys so that the students were forced to type by touch.39 It helped to be able to memorize, and it paid to have good hand-eye coordination. Warren was gifted at both. “I made As every semester in typing. We all had these manual typewriters and, of course, you’d slam the carriage back to hear this ‘ding!’
“I was—by far—the best in the class at typing out of twenty people in the room. When they’d have a speed test, I would just race through the first line so I could SLAM the carriage back. Everybody else would stop at that point, because they were still on the first word when they would hear my ‘ding!’ Then they’d panic, and they’d try to go faster, and they’d screw up. So I had a lot of fun in typing class.”
Warren put this same ferocious energy into his three paper routes. He took to the paper-throwing as if he had been born with inky fingers. Next, says Lou Battistone, “he conned the route manager, with that personality of his, into giving him The Westchester” in historic Tenleytown. In this, Warren had pulled off a coup. The Westchester was the kind of route an adult news carrier would ordinarily manage.
“It was a great opportunity. The Westchester was classy. The Westchester was just the crème de la crème. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands owned it.40 There were six U.S. Senators on that route, and colonels, and Supreme Court justices, all these biggies. There was Oveta Culp Hobby, and Leon Henderson, the head of the Office of Price Administration.” Mrs. Hobby came from a famous Texas publishing family, and had moved to Washington to serve as director of the WACs, the Women’s Army Corps.
“So all of a sudden, I had this huge operation. I might have been thirteen or fourteen years old. I first got The Westchester just for the Post. I had to give up my other morning routes when I got The Westchester, and I felt badly.” Warren had grown close to his Times-Herald manager. “And when I told him that I had the chance to get the Post at The Westchester and that meant I had to give up his route in Spring Valley…he was terrific with me, but that was really kind of a sad moment.”
By then Warren considered himself an experienced paper-route operator, but he was tackling a complex logistical challenge. The Westchester consisted of five buildings that sprawled over 27½ acres, four of them connected and one separate. The route included two more apartment buildings across Cathedral Avenue, the Marlin and the Warwick. He would also be covering a small route of single-family homes up to Wisconsin Avenue.
“I started on a Sunday, and they handed me a book telling me the people and their apartment numbers. There was no training session and I didn’t have the book in advance.” He put on his tennis shoes and pulled out his bus pass, which cost three cents each way, and climbed sleepily aboard the Capital Transit bus. He did not stop for breakfast.
“I got up there around four-thirty a.m. There were these bundles and bundles of papers.