The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [541]
3. Interview with Hallie Smith.
4. “Haight-Ashbury: The Birth of Hip,” CBC Television, March 24, 1968.
5. In 1967, over 2.5 billion shares traded, topping the previous 1966 record by one third. Thomas Mullaney, “Week in Finance: Washington Bullish,” New York Times, December 31, 1967.
6. But insurers looked undervalued and he thought they would get taken over. He bought Home Insurance and Employers Group Associates.
7. Sun Valley Conference, 2001.
8. At high rates of return, and paying no tax. If a shareholder had taken $0.06 a share—after paying a tax on the $0.10 dividend—and put it in the market earning 5% on average, he would have about $0.42. If Buffett had kept that $0.10, and compounded it at the 21% he earned over the past forty years, a shareholder, who would have been slightly diluted over the years, would be $135 richer. Looking at it on a larger scale, the tiny dividend “cost” Berkshire shareholders over $200 million as of 2007.
9. Interview with Verne McKenzie.
10. Letter to partners, July 12, 1967.
11. Interview with Verne McKenzie.
12. “Requiem for an Industry: Industry Comes Full Circle,” Providence Sunday Journal, March 3, 1968.
13. Letter to partners, January 25, 1967.
14. By September 30, 1967, the partnership had $14.2 million in treasuries and short-term debt out of a total $83.7 million invested.
15. Alice was a friend of Ringwalt’s; the family believed she may have once had some sort of “understanding” that might have led to marriage until Ernest put a stop to it. Ringwalt had a reputation as a ladies’ man, but Alice also kept house for her father, and “no one was good enough for her,” Buffett says.
16. Interview with Bill Scott.
17. Interview with Charlie Heider.
18. Robert Dorr, “‘Unusual Risk’ Ringwalt Specialty,” Omaha World-Herald, March 12, 1967, and Ringwalt’s Tales of National Indemnity and Its Founder (Omaha: National Indemnity Co., 1990) recount stories of lion tamers, circus performers, and hole-in-one contests. Buffett heard of the burlesque stars from Ringwalt.
19. Berkshire paid Heider a $140,000 fee for the transaction.
20. Interview with Bill Scott.
21. With the company closely held, it took only a week to round up the necessary 80% shareholder approvals.
22. In his book, Ringwalt says he was only driving around looking for a metered place on the street because he refused to pay a parking garage.
23. This was a reason why National Indemnity would not need reinsurance, or protection from other insurers, which was both expensive and would make it a dependent.
24. Ringwalt also was included in the shareholder register of Diversified Retailing in 1976 (he actually sold 3,032 shares back to the company in its tender offer).
Chapter 31
1. As quoted in an interview with Jose Yglesias as Dr. King prepared for the Poor People’s Campaign. Jose Yglesias, “Dr. King’s March on Washington, Part II,” New York Times, March 31, 1968.
2. Wead, who declined to be interviewed, was the director of Wesley House, a community improvement organization of the Methodist Church.
3. Interview with Racquel Newman and her son, Tom Newman. A number of other people recalled Susie and Rackie’s activities.
4. Interview with Chuck Peterson.
5. Buffett had met Rosenfield through a connection to Hochschild-Kohn.
6. Grinnell’s founder, Congregational minister Josiah Grinnell, pastor of the First Congregational church in Washington, D.C., bolted from its doors in 1852 when his Southern congregation took exception to his abolitionist views. It was Grinnell who sought advice from the famous New York Herald editor Horace Greeley and who heard the words that every schoolchild in America would subsequently learn without knowing their source: “Go West, young man, go West!” The phrase was originally written by John Soule in the Terre Haute Express in 1851.
7. Interview with Waldo “Wally” Walker, Dean of Administration at the time.