The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [65]
Warren was looking for a different kind of team. He wanted Chuck to sell used golf balls with him, but Chuck was too busy trying to study and maintain his social life. Warren also suggested that Chuck join him in a pinball business. He didn’t need Chuck’s money or labor, and it wasn’t even clear what Chuck’s role would be. But Warren, a one-man bandwagon, wanted someone to whom he could talk about his businesses, always and endlessly. If Chuck became a partner, it would make him part of Warren’s world.
He had always been good at this Tom Sawyering, but for once, he failed with Chuck. Still, he wanted Chuck as a friend as well as a business partner. He invited Chuck to visit him in Washington. Leila was astonished when Chuck ate everything she offered him, even oatmeal. “Warren won’t eat anything,” she said. “He won’t eat this, he won’t eat that. He always makes me fix something special for him.” Chuck was amused to find that Warren had his mother so well trained.
To Chuck, Warren seemed an odd mix of immature kid and brilliant prodigy. In many of his classes, he simply memorized what the professor said, not needing to look at a textbook.15 He flaunted obnoxious feats of memory by quoting page numbers and passages back in class and correcting his teachers on their text citations.16 “You forgot the comma,” he said to one.17
In an accounting course, the proctors had not even finished passing out the exam papers to the two-hundred-odd students when Warren, showing off, stood up and turned in his paper. He was done. Chuck, sitting on the other side of the room, was frustrated. Wharton was no picnic; a quarter of the class would flunk out. But Warren cruised through with no apparent effort, leaving him as much time as he wanted to drum his hands and sing Mammy, my little Mammy, all night long.
Chuck liked Warren well enough, but it all finally got to him.
“He moved out on me. One morning I woke up and Chuck was gone.”18
At term’s end that summer, Warren—who would never have thought he’d actually be glad to return to Washington—went home. Leila was in Omaha helping Howard campaign for reelection. So the Buffett kids, who had rarely gotten any relief from their parents’ austere regimen, experienced a glorious summer of freedom. Bertie was a camp counselor. Doris had a job at Garfinkel’s, where she was shocked that the store asked your religion on the job application and blacks could shop only on the first floor, where no clothing was sold.19
Washington was then the most segregated city in the United States. Blacks could not work as streetcar conductors or motormen or at anything other than the most menial jobs. They could not enter the YMCA, eat in most restaurants, rent hotel rooms, or buy theater tickets. Dark-skinned diplomats had to be chaperoned, embarrassed and scandalized by a provincialism like no place else in the world. “I would rather be an Untouchable in the Hindu caste system than a Negro in Washington,” one foreign visitor said.20 The Washington Post, referred to by some right-wingers as “The Uptown Communist Sheet,” had been on a crusade about racism for some time,21 and President Truman had desegregated the military and was pushing for civil-rights reforms. But change was slow.
Warren, who did not read the liberal Post, paid little attention to Washington’s racism. He was both unaware and immature, too absorbed in his own insecurity, his stunts, and his businesses. He returned that summer to his duties as relief circulation manager for the conservative Times-Herald. He still had the borrowed Ford and once again used it to deliver papers if he had to fill in for one of his paperboys, using the running board technique he had perfected earlier. He also reunited with his pal Don Danly. They thought about buying a fire engine together as their latest stunt,