The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [62]
“I had to give the priests and nuns about a half a dozen papers free, which always irritated me no end. I thought they weren’t supposed to be interested in secular things. But this was part of the deal. And then I went room by room, ward by ward.
“After they had the baby, the women in the obstetrics ward would see me come in and say, ‘Oh, Warren! I’m going to give you something more valuable than a cash tip. I’m going to tell you when my baby was born and how much it weighed. Eight thirty-one a.m., six pounds and eleven ounces.’” The babies’ birth times and weights were meant for betting on the “policy racket,” the numbers game in Washington.5
Warren ground his teeth whenever he got useless information instead of a cash tip. As a handicapper, he would never have played the policy racket. The odds were terrible. “The policy racket paid off six hundred to one, and the guy that was your runner got ten percent of it. So you have a five hundred forty-to-one payoff on what was a thousand-to-one shot, basically. People made penny bets and dime bets. If you put a penny up, you might win $5.40 net. And everybody in town played. Some of my newspaper delivery customers used to ask me, ‘Do you run policy numbers?’ I never did. My dad would not have approved if I’d become a policy runner.”
He was already a good enough oddsmaker to work in Vegas, but he probably would not have bet on the next thing his father did. Howard Buffett voted for a bill that actually passed, joining 330 other Congressmen who made the Taft-Hartley Act law over President Truman’s veto. One of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever enacted in the United States, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act severely restricted the tactics used by labor unions. It made it illegal for them to support one another through secondary strikes and authorized U.S. Presidents to declare a national emergency and force striking workers back to work. It was referred to as a “slave labor” bill.6 Omaha was, of course, a union town, but it would never have occurred to Howard to vote according to his constituents’ preferences; he always voted his principles.
So when the Buffetts went home to Omaha for a visit during the summer, and Warren went to a hometown baseball game with his father, he saw just how unpopular Howard had become among the blue-collar voters. “They introduced the dignitaries in between the doubleheader. And he stood up and everybody in the place started booing. He just stood there and didn’t say anything. He could handle things like that. But you just can’t imagine the effect that has on a kid.”
Even the mildest forms of confrontation terrified him. But soon he would be standing on his own, out from under his father’s wing. At almost seventeen, Warren was barely a kid. One year older and a few years earlier he might have been fighting in the war.
Instead of the military, in the fall he was starting college. The Buffetts had long taken for granted that Warren would attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.7 Wharton was the nation’s most important undergraduate business college and Penn the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin, creator of aphorisms like “he that goes a’borrowing goes a’sorrowing,” “time is money,” and “a penny saved is a penny earned.” In theory, Penn and Warren, who had the energy of two people and hustled like a stevedore while other kids played, were a perfect fit.
However, Warren would have just as soon skipped the whole thing. “What was the point?” he asked himself. “I knew what I wanted to do. I was making enough money to live on. College was only going to slow me down.” But he would never have defied his father on something so important, so he acquiesced.
Knowing their son’s immaturity, the Buffetts arranged a roommate for him who was the son of some friends from Omaha. Five years older, Chuck Peterson had just returned from eighteen months’ service in the war. He was a handsome young man-about-town, dating a different