The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [61]
“The less sophisticated the track, the better. You have people betting on the jockey’s colors, and you have them betting on their birthdays, you have them betting on the horses’ names. And the trick, of course, is to be in a group where practically no one is analytical and you have a lot of data. So I would study the forms like crazy when I was a kid.”
One grade behind Warren at Woodrow Wilson but slightly older, Bill Gray went to a few horse races with him. “He was very sharp with numbers. Very talkative.6 Very outgoing. We would discuss baseball, batting averages, sports.7
“He knew which horses he was going to pick the minute he got off the train. He would go down to the track and say, well, this horse is too much weight, or this horse, where he’s come in the last few races has not been good enough, or his times are not good enough. He knew how to judge the horses.” Warren made six-to ten-dollar bets, sometimes on the nose.*10 He only bet big if the odds looked good, but he had a way of risking some of his hard-earned paper-route money on the right horse. “He might change his mind as the different races came forward,” says Gray. “But for a sixteen-year-old, that’s not so common, you know?”
Then one time, Warren went to Charleston by himself. And he lost in the first race. But he didn’t go home. He kept on betting and he kept on losing, until he had lost more than $175 and his pockets were stripped nearly bare.
“I came back. I went to the Hot Shoppe, and I treated myself to the biggest thing they offered—a giant fudge sundae or something—and there went all the rest of my money. While I ate, I figured out how many newspapers I had to deliver to make up what I had lost. I was going to have to work more than a week to make back the money. And I’d done it for dumb reasons.
“You’re not supposed to bet every race. I’d committed the worst sin, which is that you get behind and you think you’ve got to break even that day. The first rule is that nobody goes home after the first race, and the second rule is that you don’t have to make it back the way you lost it. That is so fundamental, you know.”
Did he realize that he’d made an emotional decision?
“Oh, yeah. Oh, I was sick. It was the last time I ever did anything like that.”
14
The Elephant
Philadelphia • 1947–1949
Warren graduated sixteenth out of 350 in his high school class, putting “future stockbroker” under his picture in the yearbook.1 The first thing he and Danly did with their freedom was to go in together and buy a used hearse. Warren parked the hearse in front of the house and used it to take a girl out on a date.2 When Howard came home later, he asked, “Who put that hearse out here?” Then Leila said one of their neighbors was gravely ill, and she was not having a hearse in front of the house. That was the end of the hearse.
While he and Don were selling the hearse, Warren gave up his paper routes and got a summer job as a relief circulation manager for the Times-Herald, moving up in the world. Whenever he had to substitute for his paper carriers, he rose at four a.m., and delivered the papers from a little Ford coupe he borrowed from David Brown, a young man from Fredericksburg who had a crush on Doris and who had gone into the Navy.3 Standing on the running board of the car with the door open, he coasted at about fifteen miles an hour, one hand reaching inside the car to hold on to the wheel, the other hand grabbing the papers and pitching them onto the subscribers’ lawns. He rationalized that at such an early hour of the morning, nothing too terrible was likely to result from driving the car that way.4
Afterward he stopped by the Toddle House at four forty-five a.m. to treat himself to a double order of hash browns with paprika