The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [518]
8. This description of Washington in wartime owes much to David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
9. With so many men off to war, 15% of the city’s buses and trolleys sat idle. The Capital Transit company refused to hire blacks as conductors and motormen after it hired one black conductor in 1943 and the white conductors walked off the job. (Over the course of 1944 and 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, reported to the Attorney General that “If the company employs Negroes as operators there will be an immediate ‘wildcat’ strike…and the inevitable result would be the complete paralysis of the transportation system in the District of Columbia.” (Office memorandums re: racial conditions in Washington, D.C., September 5, 1944, and December 9, 1944, from Georgia State Special Collections.)
10. Howard University students used “stool-sitting” on two occasions: In April 1943, at Little Palace cafeteria, until the proprietor changed his policy, and a year later, with fifty-six students at Thompson’s Restaurant, where some whites joined the cause, a crowd gathered, and the police got Thompson’s to serve everyone, temporarily. (Flora Bryant Brown, “NAACP Sponsored Sit-Ins by Howard University Students in Washington, D.C., 1943–1944,” The Journal of Negro History, 85.4, Fall 2000).
11. Dr. Frank Reichel headed American Viscose.
12. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek, Warren Buffett.
13. Buffett is probably embellishing a little here with hindsight.
14. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
15. Gladys, formerly known as Gussie, changed her name to Mary sometime during this period. Warren vainly pursued a romance with her daughter Carolyn, who later married Buffett’s friend Walter Scott.
16. Warren claims it was Byron’s idea. Byron claims it was Warren’s idea. Stu says he can’t remember.
17. Joan Fugate Martin, who remembers the date, in an interview corroborated the story. She called the boys perfect gentlemen, but had nothing to add about their self-confessed awkwardness.
18. Interviews with Stu Erickson and Byron Swanson, who supplied various details of the story.
19. The phone number is from a letter from Mrs. Anna Mae Junno, whose grandfather used to work as a meat cutter.
20. The lowly stock boy was Charlie Munger.
21. Interview with Katie Buffett.
22. Ibid. Leila had a striver’s fascination with social hierarchies and upward mobility.
23. “You might argue that it was working in my grandfather’s grocery store that fostered a lot of desire for independence in me,” Buffett says.
24. This letter, which was at one time one of Buffett’s treasured heirlooms, resided in his desk drawer for many years, written on a piece of yellow paper. He can no longer locate it. Through a trade association, Ernest lobbied against chain stores and worked for legislation that would levy special taxes on them—in vain.
25. Interview with Doris Buffett.
26. Warren Buffett letter to Meg Greenfield, June 19, 1984.
27. Sadly, no one in the family can locate a copy of this manuscript today.
28. Spring Valley marketing brochure. The place had its own coat of arms.
29. “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.” Before the WAVES, the Navy accepted women only as nurses.
30. Alice Deal Junior High School was named after the first junior high principal in Washington, D.C.
31. Buffett is reasonably sure Ms. Allwine was his English teacher and that “she had good reason” for her low opinion of him. “I deserved it,” he says.
32. Interview with Casper Heindel.
33. “I’m not sure I paid tax on that either,” Warren adds.
34. In her memoir, Leila wrote that Warren would not let her touch the money.
35. Roger Bell,