The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [520]
4. Interview with Norma Thurston-Perna.
5. In an interview, Lou Battistone observes that he noticed the “two sides” of Buffett’s brain in high school—the cool mathematical businessman and the burlesque-watching one—while at the burlesque.
6. Interview with Lou Battistone.
7. Buffett told this story at Harvard Business School in 2005.
8. Carnegie was a salesman for Armour & Co., covering the Omaha territory; the compatibility of his views with Buffett’s temperament probably owes something to a shared Midwestern ethos.
9. All text, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938. Copyright Dale Carnegie & Associates. Courtesy of Dale Carnegie & Associates.
10. Dale Carnegie quoting John Dewey.
11. The average man earned $2,473 a year in 1946, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975, Series D-722–727, p. 164.
12. According to Lou Battistone in an interview.
13. According to a newspaper advertisement on July 24, 1931, at early Depression-era prices a dozen years earlier, quality refurbished golf balls cost three for $1.05.
14. Interview with Don Dedrick, a golf teammate from high school.
15. Interview with Lou Battistone.
16. “We were the only guys that paid the fifty-dollar stamp tax on pinball machines,” Warren says. “I’m not sure we would have done it if my dad hadn’t been insisting.”
17. Interview with Lou Battistone. The name “Wilson” came from Woodrow Wilson High School.
18. An essay into barbershop food concession ended quickly after the peanut dispenser, filled with five pounds of Spanish nuts, broke and got customers a handful of peanuts mixed with ground glass.
19. Dialogue and expressions used by Buffett in this story came from Lou Battistone, although the facts align with Buffett’s recollection.
20. Interview with Don Dedrick.
21. In one version of this story, told by a high school friend of Buffett’s who was not present, Kerlin was too smart to fall for it and never made it to the golf course. Whatever happened, Buffett’s version is, not surprisingly, funnier.
Chapter 13
1. Interview with Katie Buffett.
2. While this story sounds buffed and polished over the years, the tone of it rings true. Letters from Warren at college to his father a couple of years later have the same breeziness.
3. Interview with Stu Erickson.
4. Interview with Don Dedrick.
5. Interview with Bob Dwyer.
6. According to Gray, Buffett also jokingly dreamed up an idea for a magazine called Sex Crimes Illustrated while they were on the train to the Havre de Grace racetrack.
7. Interview with Bill Gray, now Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project.
Chapter 14
1. The class size is approximate because Woodrow Wilson had, in effect, two classes graduating in parallel (February and June graduates); students like Warren could shift from February to the previous June by taking a few extra credits. The school described Buffett’s top 50 ranking as falling in the top “one-seventh” of his class.
2. Barbara “Bobby” Weigand, who remembers only the hearse. Doris Buffett recalled the family debate about the hearse.
3. Interviews with Bob Feitler, Ann Beck MacFarlane, Waldo Beck. David Brown became brother-in-law of Waldo Beck, Ann Beck’s brother.
4. Interviews with Bob Feitler, Warren Buffett. Note that, because he was using the car for commercial purposes, Buffett would probably have been able to get extra gas coupons at a time when gas was tightly rationed.
5. The term “policy” probably came from the Gaelic pá lae sámh (pronounced paah lay seeh), which means “easy payday,” a nineteenth-century Irish-American gambling term.
6. The bill generated fierce anti-Taft labor