The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [519]
36. Interview with Roger Bell.
37. From Buffett’s 1944 report cards.
38. Based on comments in his report cards.
39. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.
40. Queen Wilhelmina owned stock in the Dutch holding company that had bought The Westchester.
41. He collected the bus passes from various routes. “They were colorful. I collected anything.” Asked if anyone else in his family ever collected anything: “No. They were more popular.”
42. Customers also discarded old magazines in the stairwells, and Warren would pick them up.
43. While Warren recalls the story, it was Lou Battistone who remembered its fascinating details.
44. Interview with Lou Battistone.
Chapter 10
1. This particular prank letter circulated widely in the mid-twentieth century. Where the idea originated and from whom Warren might have gotten a copy is unknown. What makes this fondly recalled prank funny (putting aside whether or how often he actually perpetrated it and upon whom) is how it plays to the commonplace interest in hidden lives and feet of clay. Its essence is a tribute to the power of shame.
2. The impact of Sears, the first department store in Tenleytown, and its unusual rooftop parking lot are described in Judith Beck Helm’s Tenleytown, D.C.: Country Village into City Neighborhood. Washington, D.C.: Tennally Press, 1981.
3. In an interview, Norma Thurston-Perna substantiates the essential elements of this story, recalls her boyfriend Don Danly “hooking” from Sears with Warren, adds that to some extent this behavior continued into high school, and mentions how annoyed she was to discover that an impressive honeysuckle fragrance and bath powder set given to her by Don as a birthday gift turned out to have been stolen from Sears.
4. A letter from Suzanne M. Armstrong to Warren Buffett, December 20, 2007, recalls a friend of her father’s cousin, Jimmy Parsons, stealing golf balls with Buffett while at Woodrow Wilson High School.
5. Hannibal was the antihero of the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs.
Chapter 11
1. See John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: HarperCollins, 1955) for an admiring portrait of Taft written from the perspective of the other side of the aisle.
2. From 1933, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, through 1947, the Consumer Price Index fluctuated wildly, spiking over 18%. The history of the Federal Reserve under inflationary conditions was short and provided little evidence to support an opinion either way.
3. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek. The others remember this story.
4. Coffee with Congress.
5. Interview with Katie Buffett. Leila apparently became obsessed with Wallis Warfield Simpson around 1936 during the abdication crisis in England.
6. Woodrow Wilson’s terms ran through February and June. Because Warren had skipped half a grade, he started his sophomore year in February.
7. Cartoonist Al Capp created Li’l Abner, who inherited his strength from his mother, the domineering Mammy Yokum, whose knockout “Good night Irene” punch maintained discipline among the Yokum clan.
8. Interview with Doris Buffett.
9. Battistone recalls Howard giving them a lift at least part of the way.
10. Although most of this information is from Strength and Health, Elizabeth McCracken wrote “The Belle of the Barbell,” a tribute to Pudgy Stockton, in the New York Times Magazine, December 31, 2006.
11. Pudgy was married to Les Stockton, a bodybuilder who had introduced her to weight lifting.
Chapter 12
1. “It was never any big success at all…it did not do well. It did not do terribly either. And it didn’t last very long,” says Buffett.
2. In interviews, Roger Bell and Casper Heindel, as well as Warren Buffett, helped remember details about the farm. Buffett believes he bought this from or through his uncle John Barber, a real estate broker.
3. Interview with Casper Heindel. More