The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [48]
At age fourteen, he had now fulfilled the promise laid out in his favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. His savings now totaled around a thousand dollars. He took great pride in that accomplishment. So far, he was ahead of the game, way ahead of the game, and getting ahead of the game, he knew, was the way to his goal.
10
True Crime Stories
Washington, D.C. • 1943–1945
Bad grades, tax evasion, and running away were the least of Warren’s troubles in junior high. His parents didn’t know it, but their son had turned to a life of crime.
“Well, I was antisocial, in eighth and ninth grade, after I moved there. I fell in with bad people and did things I shouldn’t have. I was just rebelling. I was unhappy.”
He started with minor schoolboy pranks.
“I loved print shop. I used to make calculations in print-shop class of the frequency of letters and numbers. That was something I could do by myself. I could set type, you know, and that sort of thing. I enjoyed printing up all kinds of things.
“I made up a letterhead from the American Temperance Union, Reverend A. W. Paul, President. I’d write letters to people on that letterhead saying that for years I’d lectured around the country on the evils of drink, and in these travels my appearances were always accompanied by my young apprentice, Harold. Harold was an example of what drink could do to men. He’d stand there on the stage with a pint, drooling, unable to comprehend what was going on around him, pathetic. Then I said that, unfortunately, young Harold died last week, and a mutual friend had suggested that you might be a replacement for him.”1
The people with whom Warren felt most comfortable encouraged his antisocial impulses. He and a couple of new friends, Don Danly and Charlie Tron, took to hanging out at the new Sears store. Near Tenley Circle where Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues intersected, the store was an eye-opening swoop of modern design dropped into the middle of Tenleytown, the second oldest neighborhood in Washington. Letters the height of a man spelled out SEARS on a curved metal deck several stories above sidewalk level.2 On the roof behind the Sears sign was hidden a great novelty, an open-air parking garage, which quickly became popular with high school kids as a place to park and neck. The store had become the hangout for all the junior high kids too. Warren and his friends rode the H2 bus there at lunchtime or on Saturdays.
Most of the kids liked the dark little lunch counter Sears had installed in the basement, with its mesmerizing conveyer belt that spit out doughnuts all day long. But Warren, Don, and Charlie preferred Woolworth’s across the street, even though the police station was on the opposite corner. Woolworth’s sat kitty-corner from Sears. They could eat lunch and case the joint through the windows.
After their hamburgers, the boys would stroll down the stairs into Sears’s lower level, bypassing the lunch counter and going straight to the sporting-goods section.
“We’d just steal the place blind. We’d steal stuff for which we had no use. We’d steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls.” They referred to their theft as “hooking.”
“I don’t know how we didn’t get caught. We couldn’t have looked innocent. A teenager who’s doing something wrong does not look innocent.3
“I took the golf balls and filled up these orange sacks in my closet. As fast as Sears put them out, I was hooking them. I had no use for them, really. I wasn’t selling them then. It’s hard to think of a reason why you had this multiplying group of golf balls in the closet, this orange sack that’s just getting bigger all