The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [538]
4. In July 1964, Buffett’s letter to partners said, “…our General category now includes three companies where B.P.L. is the largest single stockholder.” Readers could infer from this a fairly concentrated portfolio.
5. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, November 1, 1965.
6. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, October 9, 1967.
7. Letter from Warren Buffett to partners, January 20, 1966.
8. The author studied Buffett’s written work and interview material in reaching this conclusion. Charlie Munger, on the other hand, often uses the terms “dishonor” and “disgrace” (referring to others and not himself).
9. Interview with John Harding.
10. In 1962, according to an interview with Joyce Cowin.
11. Per capita. According to Everett Allen in Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), yearly income from whaling amounted to $12 million by 1854, making New Bedford probably the richest city per capita in the world before the Civil War.
12. More than thirty ships were lost in the disaster of 1871, most from New Bedford. The devastating cost of 1871 in financial and human terms laid waste to the industry. Whalers began building metal boats that could break through the ice in a futile quest to save what remained of the whaling industry.
13. Baleen is the “teeth” through which whales sieve plankton. The use of spring steel also reduced baleen demand.
14. Horatio Hathaway, A New Bedford Merchant. Boston: D. B. Updike, the Merrymount Press, 1930.
15. Partnership agreement, Hathaway Manufacturing Company, 1888. Among the other partners was William W. Crapo, a longtime New Bedford associate of Hetty Green’s, who also invested $25,000. The total initial capital was $400,000.
16. With a fortune estimated at $100 million.
17. Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
18. The North was no workers’ paradise, but in the South there were virtually no laws against child labor, excessive work hours, or unsafe work conditions. The mills owned the workers’ houses and the stores where they shopped, controlled their water supply, owned their churches, and effectively controlled the state governments and the courts. Machine-gun-bearing state militia prevented strikes. The workers were more like sharecroppers. Nearly ten thousand Northern workers had lost their jobs when the textile industry marched southward to the Carolinas in search of cheaper labor when air-conditioned plants were constructed after World War II.
19. Seabury Stanton, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., A Saga of Courage. New York: Newcomen Society of North America, 1962. Stanton made this address to the Newcomen Society in Boston on November 29, 1961.
20. Ibid.
21. In A Saga of Courage, Seabury says he conceived of the Stantons as forming part of an “unbroken thread of ownership” that stretched back to Oliver Chace, who had founded New England’s textile industry and created Berkshire Fine Spinning’s oldest predecessor company in 1806. Chace was a former apprentice of Samuel Slater, who first brought Sir Richard Arkwright’s innovative spinning-frame technology to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.
22. Hathaway Manufacturing Corporation Open House tour brochure, September 1953. Courtesy of Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw.
23. If the goal had been to save jobs, the money to modernize need not have been spent. Roger Lowenstein, in Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (New York: Doubleday, 1996), quotes Ken Chace (now deceased) as saying that Seabury hadn’t the slightest idea of return on investment.
24. Stanton (now deceased) is stated as having these opinions in “Berkshire Hathaway’s Brave New World,” by Jerome Campbell, Modern Textiles, December 1957.
25. Berkshire Hathaway 1994 chairman’s letter.
26. Interviews with David S. Gottesman, Marshall Weinberg.
27. Letter to Warren Buffett