The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [56]
Nevertheless, he gradually worked out for himself that the dark years of junior high were living proof that ignoring Dale Carnegie’s rules didn’t work. As he started to gain his footing in high school, he continued to practice the rules in encounters with others.
Unlike most people who read Carnegie’s book and thought, gee, that makes sense, then set the book aside and forgot about it, Warren worked at this project with unusual concentration; he kept coming back to these ideas and using them. Even when he failed and forgot and went for long stretches without applying himself to the system, he returned and resumed practicing in the end. By high school, he had accumulated a few more friends, joined the Woodrow Wilson golf team, and managed to make himself inoffensive if not popular. Dale Carnegie had honed his natural wit; above all, it enhanced his persuasiveness, his flair for salesmanship.
He seemed intense, yet with an impish side; even-tempered and congenial, yet somehow solitary. Certainly his passion for making money—which occupied most of his spare time—made him unique at Woodrow Wilson.
No one else in high school was a businessman. Just from pitching newspapers a couple of hours a day, he was earning $175 a month, more money than his teachers. In 1946, a grown man felt well paid if he made $3,000 a year for full-time work.11 Warren kept his money in a chifforobe at home, which no one but he was allowed to touch. “I was in his house one day,” says Lou Battistone, “and he opened up a drawer and said, ‘This is what I’ve been saving.’ And he had seven hundred dollars in small bills. That’s a big stack, let me tell you.”12
He had started several new businesses. Buffett’s Golf Balls peddled refurbished golf balls for six bucks a dozen.13 These he ordered from a fellow in Chicago named Witek, whom Warren couldn’t resist nicknaming “Half-Witek.” “They were classy balls, really good golf balls too, Titleist and Spalding Dots and Maxflis, which I bought for three and a half bucks a dozen. They looked brand-new. He probably got them the way we first tried to get them, out of water traps, only he was better.” Nobody at school knew about Half-Witek. Even his family didn’t seem to realize that he bought the used golf balls that he and his friend Don Danly were selling. Fellow members of the Wilson golf team thought he fished them out of water traps.14
Buffett’s Approval Service sold sets of collectible stamps to collectors out of state. Buffett’s Showroom Shine was a car-buffing business that he and Battistone ran out of Lou’s father’s used-car lot, until they abandoned this because it involved manual labor and turned out to be too damn much work.15
Then one day when Warren was seventeen and a senior, he raced to tell Don Danly about a new idea. It had the same exponential quality to it as the weighing machines from One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000—where one machine could pay for another and another. “I bought this old pinball machine for twenty-five bucks,” he said, “and we can have a partnership. Your part of the deal is to fix it up.16 And, lookit, we’ll tell Frank Erico, the barber, ‘We represent Wilson’s Coin-Operated Machine Company, and we have a proposition from Mr. Wilson. It’s at no risk to you. Let’s put this nickel machine in the back, Mr. Erico, and your customers can play while they wait. And we’ll split the money.’”17
Danly was game. Although no one had ever put pinball machines in barbershops before, they presented their proposition to Mr. Erico, who bit. The boys took the legs off the pinball machine, put it in Don’s father’s car, and hauled it over to Mr. Erico’s barbershop, where they installed it. Sure enough, the very first evening, when Warren and Don came back to check, “Gee zip!” Warren said—four bucks’ worth of nickels had found their way into the machine. Mr. Erico was delighted, and the pinball machine stayed.18
After a week, Warren emptied the machine and scooped the nickels into two piles. “Mr. Erico,” he said,