The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [54]
He thought like a businessman but did not look like one. He fit uncomfortably into the high school crowd, showing up with the same tattered sneakers and droopy socks peeking out from under baggy trousers day after day, skinny neck and narrow shoulders swallowed inside his shirt. If forced into dress shoes, he wore startling yellow or white socks above the scuffed leather. He seemed to squirm in his seat all the time. Sometimes he looked shy, almost innocent. At others, he wore a sharp, tough expression.
Doris and Warren ignored each other if their paths crossed in the halls of high school. “Doris, who was very popular, was particularly ashamed of me, because I dressed terribly. Sometimes your sister would help you get socialized but I rejected that, basically. It wasn’t her fault; I was painfully aware of being socially maladjusted. I may just have felt so hopeless.”
Warren’s stone-faced, smart-aleck act covered up the feelings of inadequacy that had made his life so difficult since leaving Omaha. He desperately wanted to be normal, but still felt very much the outsider.
He was “hesitant,” said classmate Norma Thurston, his friend Don Danly’s girlfriend, “and he chose his words carefully and never made any commitment, however small, if he thought he might have to take it back.”4
Many of his classmates plunged enthusiastically into teenage life, joining fraternities and sororities, getting pinned, and going to parties in their families’ basements where they served soda pop, hot dogs, and ice cream and then turned the lights down while everybody necked. Instead of necking, Warren rubber-necked. He had a regular Saturday night reservation with Lou Battistone at Jimmy Lake’s theater, a local burlesque joint, where they had a fantasy flirtation with one of the dancers, Kitty Lyne. Warren would roar with laughter when a comedian took a pratfall or the second banana in the balcony started heckling him.5 He spent twenty-five dollars on a 1920s-style raccoon coat. When he wore it down to Jimmy Lake’s, the bouncer told him, “No clowning around, you guys. Either take that coat off, or you can’t come in.”6 He took it off.
The side of Warren that had robbed Sears blind was in transition: fading, but not gone. He and Danly still took the occasional five-finger discount at Sears. When his teachers told him they had most of their retirement savings in AT&T stock, he shorted it, then showed them the trade tickets to give them heartburn. “I was a pain in the ass,” he says.7
His exceptional powers of reasoning and smart-aleck tendencies combined into a talent for taking perverse stands. Somehow, probably because he was the son of a Congressman, he wound up appearing on a radio program on January 3, 1946. CBS “American School of the Air” brought its program to WTOP, the local station owned by the Washington Post. On that Saturday morning, Warren went down to the station, where he and four other kids sat around a microphone and debated as “Congress in Session.”
The show’s hostess assigned him the job of spicing up the debate. He argued convincingly in favor of absurdities—ideas on the order of eliminating income taxes or annexing Japan. “When they wanted someone to take a crazy position,” he says, “I did it.” But while he relished argument for its own sake, his clever retorts, lightning-fast counterarguments, and general contrariness hindered his quest to be liked by his peers.
Until now, Warren’s efforts to get along with people had had mixed results. He charmed adults, except for his teachers. He felt ill at ease with his peers, but had always managed to make a few close friends. He desperately wanted people to like him and especially not to attack him personally. He wanted a system. In fact, he already had one, but he