The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [539]
28. Interview with Ed Anderson.
29. Interviews with Chris Browne, Ed Anderson.
30. According to Ed Anderson, this is how Buffett traded. The author is well acquainted with Buffetting in other contexts.
31. The commission sounds tiny, but at ten cents a share, Buffett later said, it was by far the highest commission he ever paid on a stock.
32. Interviews with Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw, Verne McKenzie.
33. He also felt that Seabury’s strategy of trying to bypass the New York “converters”—who turned the company’s “gray goods” into finished dyed goods and sold them to customers—was a serious misjudgment.
34. “If you’re in a business that can’t take a long strike, you’re basically playing a game of chicken with your labor unions because they’re going to lose their jobs, too, if you close down…. And there’s a lot of game theory involved. To some extent, the weaker you are, the better your bargaining position is—because if you’re extremely weak, even a very short strike will put you out of business; and the people on the other side of the negotiating table understand that. On the other hand, if you have a fair amount of strength, they can push you harder. But it is no fun being in a business where you can’t take a strike.” Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, “The Incentives in Hedge Funds Are Awesome, But Don’t Expect the Returns to Be Too Swift,” Outstanding Investor Digest, Vol. XVI, No. 4 & 5, Year End 2001 Edition.
35. Several of the Grahamites swear they saw the room. Buffett swears this story is not true. A former Plaza Hotel employee confirms that the seventeenth floor did have a few exceptionally small rooms, with bad views, and that it was possible to haggle the room prices down, especially later in the evening.
36. Interview with Ken Chace Jr.
37. According to Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett, Ken Chace was the source. Warren does not recall any of the details, including talking to Jack Stanton, but he says Ken Chace’s account is most likely correct.
38. Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw, letter to Warren Buffett, June 3, 1991. Stanley Rubin set it up.
39. Interview with Mary Stanton Plowden-Wardlaw.
40. The detailed version of this story was related in Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett, with Ken Chace as the source. Buffett recalls sitting on a bench near the Plaza with Chace, eating ice cream.
41. “The Junior League is an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism, developing the potential of women and improving the community through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers. Its purpose is exclusively educational and charitable,” according to its mission statement. (The author is a member.)
42. He replaced the elderly Abram Berkowitz, who worked for the company’s law firm, Ropes & Gray, and had cooperatively decided to step down.
43. Stanton said he “hastened [his] retirement due to a disagreement with regard to policy with certain outside interests which have purchased sufficient stock to control the company.” “Seabury Stanton Resigns at Berkshire,” New Bedford Standard-Times, May 10, 1965.
44. Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors’ minutes, May 10, 1965.
45. “Buffett Means Business,” Daily News Record, May 20, 1965.
46. Adapted in part from the documentary Vintage Buffett: Warren Buffett Shares His Wealth (June 2004) and in part from interviews.
Chapter 28
1. Interview with Doris Buffett.
2. Ibid.
3. November 10, 1965.
4. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books, 1968.
5. “Riot Duty Troops Gather in Omaha,” New York Times, July 5, 1966. The governor said the problem was unemployment, which ran triple that of whites. 30% of blacks were unemployed in Omaha.
6. Bertrand Russell, Has Man a Future? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. This powerful, absolutist book argued that unless something “radical” happened, mankind was eventually doomed by weapons of mass destruction, and predicted the