The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [53]
“There were not a lot of women in Strength and Health. Pudgy Stockton’s about the only one that ever made it. I liked Pudgy. She was impressive. We talked about her a lot at school.”
That was more than a slight understatement. Warren and Lou were obsessed with Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, a work of art in human flesh—taut thighs rippling as her chiseled arms lofted a huge barbell above her wind-whipped hair, bikini showing off her tiny waist and perky bosom to all the musclemen and gaping onlookers at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach. Five foot one and 115 pounds, she could lift a grown man in the air over her head and do it without sacrificing any of her femininity. As the world’s “Foremost Female Physical Culturist,” she wrote “Barbelles,” a column in Strength and Health, and conducted a Salon of Figure Development, “specializing in bust development, figure contouring, and reducing” in Los Angeles.10
“She had the muscle tone of Mitzi Gaynor and the mammary development of Sophia Loren,” says Lou Battistone. “She was phenomenal. And we—I have to admit to you—we lusted for her.”
Until now, Daisy Mae had been Warren’s fantasy girl. He would always look for the qualities of Daisy Mae in a woman. But Pudgy—Pudgy was real.
It was not clear, however, exactly what you did if you had a girlfriend like Pudgy.11 The boys puzzled over ads for “Bob Hoffman’s guide to a successful happy marriage,” which featured “Premarital examination. How to examine your wife before marriage to make sure she’s ‘intact,’ as well as courtship, why people marry, and minor forms of lovemaking.” Just what were the minor forms of lovemaking? they wondered. Even the major forms were largely a mystery to them; the ads in the back of Strength and Health were the best the 1940s could do in terms of sex education. Don’t worry, Dad, we’re down in the basement, doing a little studying for our physics exam.
However, in the end, Warren’s fascination with numbers won out.
“You know, you kept measuring that biceps to see if it’d gone from thirteen to thirteen and a quarter inches. And you were always worried whether you were loosening up the tape or anything. But I never improved from looking like the Charles Atlas ‘before’ picture. I think my biceps went from thirteen inches to thirteen and a quarter inches after thousands of curls.
“The Big Arms book didn’t do me much good.”
12
Silent Sales
Washington, D.C. • 1945–1947
That August, while the Buffetts were back in Omaha, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; on September 2, Japan formally surrendered. The war was over. Americans celebrated in near hysteria. But Warren recalls that he quickly started thinking through the next chess moves after the dropping of the bombs.
“I didn’t know anything about physics. But I knew you could kill a couple of hundred thousand people if you were the first one to use the bomb in a war. It’s as if I run into some guy in a dark alley, and I’ve got a cannon, but he’s got a gun. If he’s willing to pull the trigger and I have some moral compunction against doing it, he wins. Einstein said right away, ‘This has changed everything in the world except how men think.’ It put a fuse to the end of the world. Now, it may be a long fuse, and there may be ways to interrupt it, but once that metaphorical bomb has a dozen fuses all burning, the problem becomes a different sort of thing than if no fuse is lit. I was only fourteen, but it seemed to me just totally clear what was going to happen, and it has happened to quite a degree.”
A few weeks later, with the family back in Washington, Warren returned to finish tenth grade at Woodrow Wilson High School, at fifteen still a kid but now also a businessman. He was making so much money throwing papers that he had accumulated more than $2,000. Howard had let his son invest in Builders Supply Co., a hardware store that he and Carl Falk were opening next to the feed store back in Omaha.1 Meanwhile, Warren himself had bought a forty-acre farm for $1,200 about seventy miles away, near Walthill, in