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By Root 3308 0

Cornhuskers name, the University of Nebraska football team called itself the “Bugeaters” in 1892 in honor of its flying guests. Nebraska football fans still informally call themselves Bugeaters. Grasshoppers love drought conditions and contribute to soil erosion by devouring every living plant down to the black earth. From 1934–1938 the estimated national cost of grasshopper destruction was $315.8 million (about $4.7 billion in 2007 dollars). The region encompassing Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Iowa was the epicenter of grasshopper infestation. See Almanac for Nebraskans 1939; also Ivan Ray Tannehill, Drought: Its Causes and Effects. Princeton: University Press, 1947.

33. “Farmers Harvest Hoppers for Fish Bait,” Omaha World-Herald, August 1, 1931.

34. As asserted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address (March 4, 1933)—he was speaking, however, of economic paralysis.

35. Lacking electronic security and thoughtful cash controls, banks were more vulnerable to robbery in those days, and an epidemic of bank robberies took place in the 1930s.

36. Several Buffetts, including Howard and Bertie, contracted polio. Another epidemic took place in the mid-1940s. People born after the vaccine became available in the 1950s and ’60s may find the chronic anxiety this disease engendered difficult to comprehend, but it was very real at the time.

37. In 1912, twenty-five people were injured when a howling wind derailed a train near North Loup, Nebraska, according to the Almanac for Nebraskans 1939.

38. Ted Keitch letter to Warren Buffett, May 29, 2003. Keitch’s father worked at the Buffett store.

39. Interview with Doris Buffett.

40. Howard wanted his children to attend Dundee’s Benson High School instead of Central, where he had suffered from snobbery.

41. Marion Barber Stahl was a partner in his own firm, Stahl and Updike, and had become counsel to the New York Daily News, among other clients. He and his wife, Dorothy, lived on Park Avenue and had no children. Obituary of Marion Stahl, New York Times, November 11, 1936.

42. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

43. Interviews with Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett, Doris Buffett.

44. Interview with Doris Buffett.

45. September 9, 1935, at the Columbian School.

46. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek as well as Warren Buffett.

Chapter 7

1. Adults interviewed by the author who attended Rosehill as children recall it as idyllic, yet the year before Warren started first grade, Rosehill parents pleaded for relief from overcrowded rooms and a “mud hole” playground. They were told not to expect help “until the sheriff collects back taxes.” “School Plea Proves Vain,” Omaha World-Herald, January 22, 1935.

2. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

3. Walt Loomis, the teacher of the boxing lesson, was a big kid, about Doris’s age.

4. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

5. Stella’s doctors referred to her as schizophrenic, while noting she suffered annually from predictable periods of agitation and confusion, and indicated that her personality did not deteriorate as expected in schizophrenia. Based on family history and Bernice’s statement that other older relatives in addition to Stella’s mother, Susan Barber, were “maniacal” and mentally unstable, bipolar disorder may be suspected as the real condition. This disease was barely understood, to say the least, in the 1930s and ’40s.

6. From an entry in Leila’s “day book.”

7. In an interview, one of his classmates, Joan Fugate Martin, recalled Warren showing up on his rounds periodically to “shoot the breeze” in her driveway.

8. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.

9. Interviews with Stu Erickson, Warren Buffett.

10. According to his Rosehill transcript, Warren was promoted to 4B in 1939.

11. Interview with Stu Erickson.

12. “My appendectomy was the high point of my social life,” Buffett says.

13. “I wish one of those nuns had gone bad,” he says today.

14. Rosco McGowen, “Dodgers Battle Cubs to 19-Inning Tie,” New York Times, May 18, 1939. (Warren and Ernest did not stay for the entire game.)

15.