The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [526]
3. This company later became ConAgra. Buffett-Falk had apparently managed a $100,000 preferred-stock offering for it as an investment banker—at the time not a trivial transaction.
4. Interview with Margaret Landon, the secretary at Buffett-Falk.
5. According to Walter Schloss in an interview, the Norman family, who were heirs of Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, “received GEICO stock because they were big investors in Graham-Newman. When the Normans wanted to put more money with Graham-Newman, they gave Ben Graham the GEICO stock he had distributed to them instead of putting cash in. Warren is out in Omaha, and he’s buying GEICO. But Graham didn’t know he was selling to Warren, and Warren couldn’t figure out why Graham-Newman was selling it.” The distribution of GEICO stock by Graham-Newman is also described in Janet Lowe’s Benjamin Graham on Value Investing: Lessons from the Dean of Wall Street. Chicago: Dearborn Financial Publishing, 1994.
6. Interview with Bob Soener, who called him “Buffie” in those days.
7. As seen in a photograph taken in the classroom.
8. Interview with Lee Seeman.
9. People attended the class partly to get stock ideas. This was the only time he resembled Ben Graham in giving out ideas. He did so mainly because he had more ideas than money.
10. Interview with Margaret Landon. Her memory of him is in this posture, reading.
11. Office Memorandum, Cleveland Worsted Mills Company, Buffett-Falk Company, September 19, 1952.
12. Interview with Fred Stanback.
13. Buffett traded two stocks personally, Carpenter Paper and Fairmont Foods. While astute enough to set the firm up as a market maker and trade the stocks, he was immature (albeit witty) enough to refer to the CEO of Fairmont Foods, D. K. Howe, as “Don’t Know Howe.”
14. Bill Rosenwald later founded the United Jewish Appeal of New York.
15. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek.
16. Interview with Fred Stanback.
17. Interview with Chuck Peterson.
18. Brig. Gen. Warren Wood of the 34th National Guard Division.
19. Interview with Byron Swanson.
20. Interview with Fred Stanback.
21. Susie told Sue Brownlee (Sue James Stewart) this the week after she returned from her honeymoon. Interview with Sue James Stewart.
22. Wahoo is best known as the birthplace of movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck.
23. “Love Only Thing That Stops Guard,” Omaha World-Herald, April 20, 1952.
24. Interview with Buffett. Also, Brian James Beerman, “Where in the Hell Is Omaha?” Americanmafia.com, March 21, 2004.
Chapter 20
1. General Douglas MacArthur made a halfhearted run for the nomination but was eclipsed by Taft. He and his former aide Eisenhower were bitter enemies.
2. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
3. David L. Dodd, Associate Dean, Columbia University, letter to Warren Buffett, May 20, 1952.
4. This was the same Robert Taft who had cosponsored the Taft-Hartley Act, much favored among businessmen but despised by broad swaths of Americans. In short, Taft represented the extreme end of the party, which made him less likely to capture moderate voters.
5. Ironically, many in this faction promoted tariffs, government farm supports, and tough labor laws desired by their small-business and farm constituents, even though this may have seemed inconsistent with their other views on government. Another famous member of this group was popular Nebraska Senator Ken Wherry, the “merry mortician,” famous for malapropisms such as calling Indochina “Indigo China,” addressing the chairman as “Mr. Paragraph,” and offering his “unanimous opinion.” Time, June 25, 1951. Wherry died shortly before the election.
6. The leaders of this wing of the party were Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller, despised by Howard Buffett and like-minded Republicans as rich East Coast Ivy League elitists who abandoned core Republican principles to join forces with Democrats whenever it furthered their own pragmatic interests and those of “big business.”
7. “Top GOP Rift Closed But Not the Democrats’,” New York Times, September 14, 1952; Elie Abel, “Taft Rallies Aid