The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [544]
26. In the form of a convertible debenture.
27. Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip.
28. Buffett told his partners about the “particularly outstanding performances” of Associated Cotton Shops and National Indemnity Company. But the controlled companies had only a “decent” performance overall; Berkshire and Hochschild-Kohn were dragging down the results.
Chapter 33
1. A former Kelly girl temporary office worker, Kaiser came to work in January 1967 and stayed until her retirement in 1993.
2. Interview with Donna Walters. Buffett shared Walters with Sol Parsow, the men’s haberdasher in the building’s lobby.
3. Blue Chip stamps were the closest equivalent.
4. Beginning with “Love Only Thing That Stops Guard,” Omaha World-Herald, April 20, 1952, continuing to a cute feature picture of Susie and the kids packing a picnic Thermos, and a story about him buying Sam Reynolds’s house.
5. Loomis’s recollections are from her memoir in Fortune, “My 51 Years (and Counting) at Fortune,” Fortune, September 19, 2005.
6. Loomis wrote an admiring profile of hedge-fund manager A. W. Jones, “The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With,” Fortune, April 1966, around the time or shortly before she met Buffett. In this article she mentions Buffett in passing. She did not begin to profile him in her writing until “Hard Times Come to the Hedge Funds,” Fortune, January 1970.
7. Buffett says that he never actually overslept his paper route. This seems to be his version of the common “test-anxiety dream.”
8. Interview with Geoffrey Cowan.
9. Interview with Tom Murphy.
10. Warren Buffett letter to Jay Rockefeller, October 3, 1969. Buffett added, “It tends to be a very poor business unless you have a life-size fold-out of a girl in the middle. I have frequently told my partners that I would rather lose money logically than make money for the wrong reasons. Hopefully, I will come up with some similar aphorism to rationalize this deal.”
11. Buffett put in $32,000 to start.
12. Interview with Charles Peters, with additional condensed comments adapted from Peters’s memoir, Tilting at Windmills. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988.
13. Buffett put in another $50,000.
14. After being told that he couldn’t donate his investment in the Washington Monthly to charity, “I finally let them give the stock to one of the people who worked there, just to get rid of it,” says Stanback. “It was worthless.”
15. Letter to partners, May 29, 1969.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The Buffetts hired teachers as babysitters, but Howie co-opted the teachers’ husbands into becoming his confederates, doubling the degree of lawlessness.
19. Al Pagel, “Susie Sings for More Than Her Supper,” Omaha World-Herald, April 17, 1977.
20. Interview with Milton Brown.
21. Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, 2004.
22. Letter to partners, October 9, 1969.
23. John Brooks, The Go-Go Years. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.
24. The stock had “split” so that each share became five, then promptly rose to $25 per share.
25. Blue Chip had called a shareholders’ meeting to vote on a secondary offering in which shareholders could offer blocks of existing stock to the public.
26. Interview with Wyndham Robertson, who says she could barely understand the code when she first joined the Graham Group two years later in Carmel.
27. Letter to Graham Group, September 21, 1971.
28. Interviews with Marshall Weinberg, Tom Knapp, Fred Stanback, Ruth Scott.
29. Interview with Ed Anderson.
30. Letter from Warren Buffett to Graham Group, September 21, 1971.
31. Interview with Fred Stanback.
32. Interview with Sandy Gottesman, who notes that they basically broke even on the deal; he says that a bit of mythology has arisen around the Hochschild-Kohn deal. “It goes down in history as an enormous mistake,” he says. “And I don’t think it was as big a mistake as represented…it’s grown way out of proportion.”
33. Supermarkets General bought Hochschild-Kohn in 1969 for $5.05 million cash plus $6.54