The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [47]
“The whole thing was a disaster. I thought, what the hell have I gotten into? It took until ten or eleven in the morning to finish up.
“But I stumbled my way through. And it got better and I got good very fast. It was easy.”
Warren raced out of his house to catch the first N2 bus over to The Westchester at 3900 Cathedral Avenue every morning. Often he had bus-pass number 001, the first person buying a bus pass each week.41 The driver got used to looking out for him if he was running a little late. He would jump off the bus and run the couple of blocks over to The Westchester.
He had figured out the most efficient route and turned what could have been a boring and repetitive job delivering hundreds of newspapers each day into a competition with himself. “See, the papers were a little thinner in those days, because of newsprint rationing. A thirty-six-page paper was a pretty good-size paper. I’d stand at one end of the hallway with a bundle and pull off a paper, fold it over flat, and tuck it to make a pancake, or roll it into a biscuit. Then I smacked it against my thigh. And I’d twist it against my wrist to put some spin on it and slide it down the hall. I could slide that thing fifty, even a hundred feet. It was kind of a test of skill, because the apartment doors were at different lengths down the hallway. I’d do the longest ones first. But the trick was to be able to do it in such a way that they’d all come to rest a few inches from the door. And sometimes people would have milk bottles, which made it more interesting.”
He also sold calendars to his newspaper customers, and he developed another sideline too. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort.42 Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.43
Because The Westchester had so much turnover in wartime, Warren’s biggest dread was customers who skipped out and didn’t pay, leaving him stuck with the cost of their papers. After a few people skipped out on him, he started tipping the elevator girls to let him know when people were about to move. Then the imperious Oveta Culp Hobby got behind. He thought that she should have a little more empathy for her paperboy, since she owned her own newspaper, the Houston Post. But he began to worry that she would skip out on him.
“I paid my own bills monthly, always on time, and I always showed up to deliver the papers. I was a responsible kid. I got presented with a war bond for perfect service. With the customers, I didn’t want to let the receivables build up. I tried all kinds of things with Oveta Culp Hobby—leaving notes—and finally ended up knocking on her door at six in the morning to catch her before she could escape.” Shy in other ways, Warren was never timid when it came to money. When Mrs. Hobby answered the door, “I handed her an envelope, and she had to pay me.”
After school, Warren rode the bus back to Spring Valley and jumped on his bike to deliver the Star. On rainy winter afternoons, he would sometimes come off his paper route and appear on the doorstep of his friends’ homes. He always wore battered canvas sneakers, so full of holes that his feet were swimming to the ankles; his skin would be pimply with cold inside a soaking-wet oversize plaid shirt. For some reason he never seemed to wear a coat. Motherly Mrs. Whoever would smile and shake her head at the pitiful sight, bundle him up, and towel him off while he basked in her warmth.44
At the end of 1944, Warren filed his first income