The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [560]
42. Interview with Peter Buffett.
43. Interview with Tom Newman.
44. Two sources have confirmed this.
45. Interview with Astrid Buffett.
46. Ibid.
47. Interview with Michael Adams.
48. Interview with Astrid Buffett.
49. The 1977 letter contains significantly more “teaching” content than its predecessor. Although Buffett had control of Berkshire for twelve years previously, the 1977 letter was the first to be collected in a bound collection of letters he used to hand out to friends and is the first year featured on Berkshire’s website.
Chapter 42
1. Interview with Astrid Buffett.
2. Interview with Michael Adams.
3. Interview with Kelly Muchemore.
4. From a close friend of the family.
5. Buffett explained in conversation and a letter to the author how he felt, separating his life into two stages with age forty-seven as the turning point.
6. To the end of her life, Estey wrote letters with “Mrs. Benjamin Graham” embossed on her stationery.
7. Interview with the author, 2003.
8. Katharine Graham, Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
9. Interview with Stan Lipsey.
10. Interview with Sharon Osberg.
11. Astrid Buffett recalled the VCR conversation in an interview.
12. Jeannie Lipsey Rosenblum and others recall the details in interviews.
13. Interview with Peter Buffett.
14. Bryant campaigned to make it illegal for gays to teach in public schools in Dade County, Florida, and succeeded in passing a civil-rights ordinance against gays.
15. The price included $1.5 million in pension liabilities. Blue Chip Stamps Annual Report, 1977. Blue Chip borrowed $30 million from a bank in April 1977 to finance the purchase.
16. Berkshire had assets of $379 million, Blue Chip had $200 million, DRC had $67.5 million at year-end 1977.
17. Warren and Susie personally owned 46% of Berkshire (both directly and indirectly, through their ownership of Blue Chip and Diversified, which owned Berkshire stock), and 35% of Blue Chip (both directly and indirectly).
18. Murray Light, From Butler to Buffett: The Story Behind the Buffalo News (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), who notes that only in the face of an inquiry from the Human Rights Commission in the early 1970s did Butler begin publishing wedding photos of African-Americans.
19. Interview with Stan Lipsey.
20. The Evening News put out a Saturday edition, but its weak ad lineage demonstrated the power of the Sunday edition of the Courier-Express.
21. If the trend had continued without the Evening News starting a Sunday paper, the logical outcome would have been either a joint operating agreement or outright acquisition of the Courier-Express to combine the papers—both expensive alternatives.
22. Buffalo Courier-Express, Inc., v. Buffalo Evening News, Inc., Complaint for Damages and Injunctive Relief for Violation of the Federal Antitrust Laws (October 28, 1977).
23. Former Courier-Express reporter Michael A. Hiltzik posted on June 20, 2000, on Jim Romenesko’s “Media News Extra,” a recollection of the staff writing puff pieces on every local state judge in order to flatter whichever one was chosen. It was a “misguided strategy,” he said, as the trial took place in federal court under Brieant. One of the profiles supposedly was titled “Judge Loses Firmness When He Doffs His Robe.”
24. Interview with Ron Olson.
25. Jonathan R. Laing, “The Collector: Investor Who Piled Up $100 Million in the ’60s Piles Up Firms Today,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1977.
26. Testimony of Buffett, Buffalo Courier-Express, Inc., v. Buffalo Evening News, Inc., November 4, 1977.
27. In Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Bob Russell cited Warren as a boy wanting to charge money to people driving by the Russells’ house. Buffett does not remember the incident, but if it occurred, most likely he was influenced by the city’s efforts to convert the Douglas Street toll bridge—the only passageway over the Missouri River—to a free bridge, one of the most widely reported local news stories during his early youth.
28. The bridge was sold to Marty Maroun