The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [517]
16. This explanation of bridge was provided by Bob Hamman, eleven-time world champion and #1-ranked bridge player in the world between 1985 and 2004. Hamman appears at the Berkshire shareholders’ meeting.
Chapter 8
1. Warren bought the gum for three cents a pack from his grandfather.
2. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek.
3. Two presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, had previously sought election to a third term. Both were defeated.
4. The Trans-Lux Corporation placed the first ticker-tape projection system at the New York Stock Exchange in 1923. The system worked something like a fax machine. Trans-Lux knew a good thing when it saw one: The company’s own stock was listed on the American Stock Exchange in 1925, and Trans-Lux remains the oldest listed company on the Amex today.
5. Frank Buffett had reconciled with Ernest on Henrietta’s death in 1921 and ran the other Buffett store. John Barber was a real estate agent.
6. Pyramid schemes are frauds that promise investors impossible returns, using cash from later investors to pay off earlier investors and create the appearance of success. To keep going, the scheme has to grow like a pyramid, but their geometrically compounding structure guarantees eventual failure and discovery.
7. Alden Whitman, “Sidney J. Weinberg Dies at 77; ‘Mr. Wall Street’ of Finance,” New York Times, July 24, 1969; Lisa Endlich, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success. New York: Knopf, 1999.
8. That Weinberg cared about his opinion mattered more than the opinion itself; Buffett has no recollection of which stock he recommended to Weinberg.
9. Buffett later said, in an interview, that these were the words that ran through his head—“that’s where the money is”—although at the time he was not familiar with the famous quote attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton.
10. Almost a decade later, he would lower the age to 30 while talking to his sister Bertie, who was 14 or 15 at the time. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
11. Buffett believes he overheard his father talking about the stock, which traded on the “Curb Exchange,” where brokers gathered in the street (later organized into the American Stock Exchange).
12. From the records of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.
Chapter 9
1. “All these handouts in Europe are being used by the politicians to retain and expand their own power.” “U.S. Moving to Socialism,” citing Howard Buffett, Omaha World-Herald, September 30, 1948.
2. Roosevelt said this in Boston on October 30, 1940, while campaigning for his third term, fourteen months before Pearl Harbor.
3. Leila Buffett letter to Clyde and Edna Buffett, undated but approximately 1964.
4. United States Department of Agriculture and Nebraska Department of Agriculture, Nebraska Agricultural Statistics (preliminary report) 1930. Lincoln, Government Printing Office, 1930, p. 3.
5. Buffett’s impression of 1940s South Omaha was vivid: “If you walked around down there in those days, believe me, it was not conducive to eating hot dogs.”
6. John R. Commons, “Labor Conditions in Meat Packing and Recent Strike,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1904; Roger Horowitz, “‘Where Men Will Not Work’: Gender, Power, Space and the Sexual Division of Labor in America’s Meatpacking Industry, 1890–1990,” Technology and Culture, 1997; Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1997; Harry B. Otis, with Donald H. Erickson, E. Pluribus Omaha: Immigrants All. Omaha: Lamplighter Press (Douglas County Historical Society), 2000. Horowitz, commenting specifically on Omaha, points out that slaughterhouses in 1930 were still organized much the same way as portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.
7. In 2005, the GAO cited “respiratory irritation or even asphyxiation from exposure to chemicals, pathogens, and gases” as a current occupational risk for industry workers in GAO