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“Everybody knew we had the pinball-machine business, and everybody kind of knew we were raking it in. We probably exaggerated too when we told them. And so people wanted in on it. It was like stocks.”

One of them was a boy named Bob Kerlin—an intense kid who played on the golf team with Warren.20 He and Don weren’t open to letting anyone in on their pinball business, but they did have a plan for using Kerlin for their newest venture. “We had given up stealing the golf balls from Sears, but we got this idea that we were going to retrieve lost golf balls from the lakes on golf courses around Washington. And now we saw a position for Kerlin, because neither one of us wanted to retrieve the golf balls.”

They created an elaborate scenario for how Kerlin would do this. It bordered on an evil prank, but school was out in a couple of months, so what the hell.

“We went down again to Ninth and D, where the army surplus store was located, right by Silent Sales, and bought a gas mask. And then we got this garden hose and we hooked them up and tested this thing in a bathtub by putting our faces in three inches of water.”

Doing what he called his Tom Sawyer routine, Warren said to Kerlin: “‘This is your chance. We’re going to deal you in.’ We told him that we would go out at four in the morning to some golf course in Virginia, and that he would wear the gas mask in the lake and retrieve the balls, and we’d split the money three ways.

“Kerlin said, ‘How do I stay down on the bottom?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got that all worked out. What we will do is, you’ll strip, and you’ll be nude, but you’ll wear my Washington Post newspaper bag, and we’ll put barbell plates in the newspaper bag so that you’ll stay on the bottom.’

“So we went out to this golf course, and all the way Kerlin was expressing some doubt. And Danly and I said, ‘Have we ever failed? I mean, you’re looking at a couple of guys…if you want to quit now, okay, but, you know, you’re not in any future deals.’

“So we got out there at the crack of dawn. Kerlin was stripped, and we were dressed warmly. He was totally nude with a Washington Post newspaper bag on and all these barbell plates, and he started wading into the lake. Of course, he didn’t know if he was stepping on snakes or golf balls or whatever. And then he got down and when he tugged on the rope, we pulled him back up. He said, ‘I can’t see anything.’ We said, ‘Don’t worry about seeing anything, just grope around.’ And he started to go back down.

“But before his head went under, this truck came over the rise, carrying the guy that’s going to fill up sand traps in the morning. He saw us and drove up, saying, ‘What are you kids doing?’ Danly and I were thinking fast. ‘We’re conducting an experiment for our high school physics class, sir.’ Kerlin was nodding the whole time. So we had to get him out of the pond. The whole thing blew up on us.”21

Whatever happened to poor Kerlin, and however nude he actually was, a watered-down version of this story got around. It would be the last great Tom Sawyering of Warren’s high school career.

By now, however, he had made a small fortune: a glistening $5,000 heap, sticky with the newsprint from throwing more than five hundred thousand newspapers. Newsprint snowflakes made up more than half his snowball. Rich as he was, however, Warren meant to keep that snowball rolling.*8

13

The Rules of the Racetrack

Omaha and Washington, D.C. • 1940s

Warren’s Dale Carnegie tests of behavior were handicapping: a mathematical experiment on human nature. The data he collected gave him the odds that Carnegie was right.

This way of thinking was an extension of his childhood hobby of calculating the odds on the life expectancies of hymn composers. But his interest in longevity was no mere abstraction. Ernest Buffett, to whom Warren was extremely attached, had died in September 1946 at age sixty-nine, while the family was in Omaha campaigning for Howard’s third term. Warren was sixteen. Of his four grandparents, only Stella, age seventy-three,