The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [63]
In the fall of 1947, the entire family piled into the car and drove Warren to Philadelphia, where they deposited him and his raccoon coat in a little dormitory suite with a shared bathroom. Chuck had already moved in, but was out on a date somewhere.
As the Buffetts drove away to return to Washington, they left their son at a campus filled with people much like Chuck. An army of World War II veterans marched across College Green and filled the Quad, the centers of Penn university life. Their worldliness widened by years the gap Warren had felt between himself and his classmates ever since moving to Washington. On an organized, busy, social campus, his baggy T-shirts and worn tennis shoes stood out among the purposeful men dressed in sports coats and polished oxfords. Penn was a football powerhouse; its fall social life revolved around football dates, followed by fraternity parties. Warren loved sports, but the social requirements were beyond him. He was used to spending much of his time honing ideas, counting his money, organizing his collections, and playing music in the privacy of his room. At Penn, his solitude battered by the sixteen hundred flirting, necking, jitterbugging, keg-tapping, football-tossing members of the Class of 1951,8 he was a butterfly in a beehive.
The bees reacted much as expected to the butterfly that had flown into their midst. Chuck retained his military tidiness and the habit of constantly polishing his shoes. When he met his new roommate, Warren’s disgraceful wardrobe shocked him. He soon discovered that the way Warren dressed symptomized something else. Just as Leila waited hand and foot on Howard and did all the work around the house, Warren had never been taught the most basic ways of taking care of himself.
Chuck stayed out late socializing as usual his first evening after they met. The next morning, he woke late to find the bathroom in a mess and his new roommate gone to early classes. When he saw Warren that evening, he said, “Clean up after yourself, will you?” “Okay, Chas-o,” Warren said. “I came in this morning and you left a razor lying at the bottom of the sink,” Chuck went on. “You left soap all over the sink, the towels were on the floor, and it’s sloppier than hell. I like things neat.” Warren appeared to agree. “Okay, Chas-o, okay, Chas-o,” he said.
The next morning, when Chuck got up, he stepped through sodden towels on the bathroom floor to find tiny damp hairs covering the sink, and a brand-new, soaking-wet electric razor lying in the basin, tethered to the outlet in the wall by its cord. “Warren, lookit,” said Chuck that evening. “Unplug the damn thing. Somebody’s going to get electrocuted. I’m not going to pick it up out of the sink every morning. You’re driving me nuts with your sloppiness.” “Okay, okay, fine, Chas-o,” said Warren.
The next day was exactly as before, the razor lying in the sink. Chuck realized that his words were bouncing off Warren’s head. He lost his temper and decided to take action. He unplugged the razor, filled the sink with water, and threw the razor in.
The following morning, Warren had bought a new razor, plugged it in, and left the bathroom in the same state as before.
Chas-o gave up. He was living in a pigsty with a hyperactive teenager who hopped around in constant motion, drumming his hands, beating them on every nearby surface. Warren was obsessed with Al Jolson and played Jolson records day and night.9 He sang, over and over, imitating Jolson: “Mammy, my little Mammy, I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles, my Mammy!”10
Chuck needed to study, and he could not hear himself think inside the suite. Warren, on the other hand, had plenty of time to sing. He hadn’t bought a lot of textbooks, but he had read the ones he bought at the beginning of the semester, before classes started, the way someone else might flip through a Life magazine. Then he threw