The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [51]
Leila, herself a determined striver who cared deeply about appearances, would pore over every bit of news about the Duchess of Windsor, a penniless commoner who had been rescued by a prince.5 But, unlike the duchess, who spent the rest of her life amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of jewels, Leila’s ambition and pride wrapped themselves in a self-conscious disdain for ostentation. She pictured the family as a middle-class Midwestern archetype, a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, and berated Doris for being socially ambitious.
Still fourteen years old, Warren became a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School in February 1945, upon his graduation from Alice Deal.6 He wanted to be both “special” and “normal” at the same time. Much less mature than his classmates, he was being carefully watched by his parents, who were determined to see him straighten out. His paper routes were the source of his autonomy, such autonomy as he now had. And he had been reading—as well as throwing—the papers.
“I read the comics, the sports section, and looked at the stock pages every morning before I delivered the newspapers. I read the cartoon Li’l Abner every morning. I had to know what Li’l Abner was doing every day. His appeal was that he made you feel so smart. You’d read this thing and think, ‘If I was in that position…this guy is so dumb.’ Because here was Daisy Mae, this incredible woman who was just nuts about him, and was always chasing after him, and he just kept passing her up and not noticing her. Every red-blooded American boy in those days would have been just waiting there for Daisy Mae to catch him.”
Daisy Mae Scragg, the hillbilly heroine of the Appalachian cartoon hamlet of Dogpatch, was a bodacious blonde whose cleavage burst from an off-the-shoulder polka-dot blouse. The dim-witted strongman Li’l Abner Yokum spent most of his time trying to evade Daisy Mae’s marital designs on him. But the faster he ran away, the more deaf he seemed to her attention and longing, the more he spurned her, the harder Daisy Mae chased him. Even though rich and powerful men wooed her, to Daisy Mae there was but one man on earth, Li’l Abner.7
Besides elusiveness, Li’l Abner’s only apparent asset was his manly physique. Warren’s poor record with girls so far suggested that if he ever wanted to attract the interest of a girl like Daisy Mae, he had better do something to make himself more attractive. Now he developed a new interest, which conveniently gave him an excuse as well for hiding away down in the basement. The way that Frankie Zick could clean-and-jerk fifty-pound bags of animal feed for hours at a time at South Omaha Feed had impressed him. He got his friend Lou Battistone interested and they embarked on a weight-lifting program. At the time, weight training was not the stuff of serious athletes, but it had many qualities that appealed to Warren: systems, measuring, counting, repetition, and competing with yourself. In search of technique, he had discovered Bob Hoffman and his magazine, Strength and Health.
Strength and Health was Hoffman’s attempt to overcome the stigma against weight lifting through aggressive promotion. It was edited, published, and apparently written largely by Hoffman himself. Ads for his products appeared on nearly every page. “Uncle” Bob’s technical knowledge, his razzle-dazzle, the man’s unflagging ability to market himself, were striking.
“He was the coach of most of the Olympic team. He was the head of the York Barbell Company, and he was the author of the Big Arms and the Big Chest books. The basic thing he sold initially was barbell sets. If you went to a sporting-goods store then, everything was York barbells. You could buy all these different kinds of sets.”
Warren got a set of dumbbells and a barbell with a set of plates in increments of one and a quarter pounds that slipped on and off the bar, which he tightened with a little screwdriver that came with the set. He kept the weights in the basement and was “always down there clanking. My parents