The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [57]
“You had to get along with the barbers. That was crucial. I mean, these guys could all go buy these machines for twenty-five bucks themselves. So we would always convince them that it took someone with a four-hundred IQ to repair pinball machines.
“Now, there were some pretty unsavory characters in the pinball business, and they all hung out at a place called Silent Sales. That was our hunting ground. Silent Sales was in the 900 block of D Street, right near the Gayety burlesque house on the seedy side of downtown. These characters at Silent Sales were amused by us, sort of. Danly and I would go down there, and we’d look at these machines and buy whatever we could for twenty-five bucks. New machines cost about three hundred dollars. I used to subscribe to Billboard magazine in those days to keep track of what was going on in pinball machines.
“The guys at Silent Sales taught us some things. There were some illegal slot machines around. And they showed us how to pour beer into them to make a fifty-cent piece get stuck in the mechanism, and you could just keep pulling the handle until it paid. They showed us how to disable the electric cutoff for the coin-operated soda machines at the movie theaters so if you stuck a nickel in, then immediately pulled the plug, you could empty the whole machine.
“These guys would explain all this stuff to us and we’d just eat it up.
“My dad probably suspected the kind of characters we were hanging out with. But he always felt I’d turn out okay.”
Warren and Don were already making good money with single pinball machines in barbershops, but then they found a gold mine. “Our home run of all time was down near Griffith Stadium, which is the old baseball park.” In the middle of Washington’s worst slums, they found “a seven-chair black barbershop. There were a lot of dudes down there. After we put a pinball machine in, we would come back to collect, and these guys had drilled holes in the bottom of the machine and rigged the tilt mechanism. It was a real contest of wills. But that was our mother lode, our best location by far. The guys who played at these barbershops were constantly imploring us to adjust the tilt mechanism so you could shove the machine harder without making it tilt.
“Listen, we were not judgmental about our customers.” If anything, they were probably trying to pick up more ideas like the scams the guys at Silent Sales had taught them, and those they were inventing on their own. “One time we were down in Danly’s basement playing with my coin collection. To make collecting on the paper route more interesting, I used to collect different kinds of coins. So I had these Whitman coin boards with slots for the coins. I said to Don, ‘It looks to me like we could take these coin boards and use them as molds for casting slugs.’
“Danly was the brains of the operation. And so, sure enough, he learned how to pour these molds for casting slugs, and I supplied the coin boards. We would try to use the slugs for vending machines for soda pop and things like that. Our basic formula was to have our income in currency and our outgo in slugs.
“One time, Danly’s father came down in the basement and said, ‘What are you boys doing?’
“We were pouring metal into these things. And it was, ‘We’re doing this experiment for school, Dad.’ We were always doing experiments for school.”
At school, however, Warren mostly liked to talk about his businesses—not his scams—and by the spring semester, near the end of high school, his raconteuring had turned him