The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [533]
6. Said approvingly in Lowe, Damn Right!
7. Interview with Lee Seeman.
8. Interview with Mary McArthur Holland.
9. Interview with Howard Jessen, a friend of the Buffetts’.
10. His grandfather, a prominent Omaha lawyer, was a friend of Dean Roscoe Pound, the dean of Harvard Law School.
11. Munger made no effort to burnish a résumé by, for example, joining the Law Review. In an interview, he described himself as relatively aloof.
12. His father also gave him this advice.
13. Lowe, Damn Right!
14. As quoted in Lowe, Damn Right!
15. Munger, as told to Janet Lowe in Damn Right!
16. In Damn Right!, Munger compared getting married to investing. Nancy said he was “uptight” about showing emotions. His son Charles Jr. said, “There are some things my dad could deal with better if he faced them more” but “he just walks away.”
17. Munger, as quoted in Lowe, Damn Right!
18. Ibid.
19. In Damn Right!, Nancy says that Charlie “was not much of a helpmate around the house.” For her seventieth birthday, Buffett says he went to a pawn shop and got her a Purple Heart.
20. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
21. Lowe, Damn Right!
22. Interview with Charlie Munger.
23. Interview with Lee Seeman.
24. In a year when the Dow was up 38.5%, Warren had managed to beat it, taking minimal risk.
25. In addition to his $100 stake in Buffett Associates, Buffett had later put $100 into each of his other partnerships: Buffett Fund, B-C, Underwood, Dacee, Mo-Buff, and Glenoff.
26. Interview with Lee Seeman.
27. This version differs from some others that have been published. For example, Susie Buffett has said that she was present. Several writers have set the meeting at a dinner at Johnny’s Café. Roger Lowenstein, however, also set the meeting at the Omaha Club. Most likely, other versions are conflations of later events. To the author, Seeman’s version is the most detailed yet has the least embellished air.
28. Interview with Charlie Munger. The dinner is reconstructed from interviews with Buffett and Munger, whose memories are hazy. Nancy Munger doesn’t remember. The wives were introduced soon after the first meeting, and Johnny’s is the most likely location. Buffett recalls Munger’s self-intoxication clearly.
Chapter 24
1. Estimated. Buffett was managing $878,211 at the end of 1958 in six partnerships. The $50,000 Glenoff Partnership was formed in February 1959. By the end of 1959, the partnerships’ market value had grown to $1,311,884. His personal funds and Buffett & Buffett increased this total.
2. Sanborn sent its customers paste-over revisions each year showing new construction, changed occupancy, new fire-protection facilities, and changed structural materials. A new map was published every few decades. Buffett took note of the company, as far as he recalls, when a large block of stock came up for sale. The widow of the deceased president was reportedly selling 15,000 shares because her son was leaving the company. Phil Carret owned 12,000 shares.
3. Five or ten shares apiece, forty-six shares in total.
4. Buffett had become friendly with the company’s CEO, Parker Herbell, whom he said the rest of the board treated as an “errand boy.” Herbell supported the plan to separate the investments from the map business, and had facilitated some of its underpinnings, such as this study.
5. “It does not make sense to have management, consultants, and major stockholders in complete agreement regarding a course of action but unable to proceed because of directors owning an insignificant amount of stock.” Warren Buffett letter to C. P. Herbell, September 25, 1959.
6. In those days, appreciated shares could be exchanged for a company’s own shares. So a company could get rid of the capital-gains tax that was inherent in an operation if it just sold stock from time to time.
7. As part of the deal, the Buffett partnerships agreed to tender their stock.
8. Interview with Doris Buffett.
9. Interview