The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [69]
But Howard, of course, dreaded inflation and believed that government bonds could turn into worthless paper. Overcoming his scruples, he went to work to break the terms of Frank’s will and got a judge to approve some technical changes so the money could eventually be invested in stocks.41
These events took place during what Leila called the “worst winter in years.” Blizzards buried the Midwest and hay had to be airlifted to Nebraska from surrounding states for weeks during the freeze to keep the snowbound livestock from dying on their feet.42 The winter of the haylift became emblematic of the Truman victory. Howard, who had never gotten rich, now had two kids in college and another about to start. He went back to work at his old firm, now known as Buffett-Falk, but his partner Carl Falk, who had been handling his clients during his absence in Washington, was not interested in sharing them now. Striding around downtown Omaha with the bitter snow pelting his face, Howard tried to drum up new clients. But his long absence meant that his writings were the way most people knew him now, and articles like “Human Freedom Rests on Gold Redeemable Money” had given him the reputation of an extremist.43 In the spring of 1949, he went out into the countryside and knocked on farmhouse doors in search of a new clientele.44
As for Warren, his father’s defeat left him heartsick, but also offered him an excuse for leaving the East Coast. He was bored at school and hated Philadelphia so much that he had nicknamed it “Filthy-delphia.”45
At the end of the spring semester he headed back home for good, so relieved that he signed his letters “Ex-Wharton Buffett.” He rationalized this by saying that enrolling at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he would spend the last years of his college career, would be cheaper than Penn.46 He gave the little Ford coupe back to David Brown, its tires threadbare. It was Brown’s problem to figure out how to replace them, since tires were still rationed.47 Warren wanted only one memento of Penn. On the way out the door, he and Clyde flipped a coin to see who got to keep their treasured copy of S.J. Simon’s Why You Lose at Bridge. Warren won.
15
The Interview
Lincoln and Chicago • 1949–Summer 1950
The first thing Warren did on returning to Nebraska in that summer of 1949 was get a job in newspapers, managing country circulation for the Lincoln Journal. He and his friend Truman Wood, who was Doris’s boyfriend, went halves on a car. Warren felt comfortable in Lincoln, going to university classes in the morning, then driving around managing his route in the afternoon. In his spare moments he called on the local newspaper editors and talked business, politics, and journalism. Supervising rural paperboys was a serious job, for he was now the boss. Fifty young boys in six rural counties reported to “Mr. Buffett.” The challenges of management suddenly became clear when he hired a minister’s daughter in the town of Beatrice, thinking she would be a responsible paper carrier. The three paperboys in Beatrice promptly quit: He’d turned it into a sissy job.
Warren spent part of his time that summer in Omaha, selling men’s furnishings at JC Penney’s. His spirits had begun to revive. He bought a ukulele to compete with the uke-playing boyfriend of a girl he was pursuing, but wound up holding only the ukulele instead of the girl.
Penney’s, however, was a good place to work. The employees put on an unofficial pep rally in the basement every morning where Warren, clad in a cheap suit, played his new ukulele—off the clock—while everyone sang, before heading off to his seventy-five-cents-an-hour job in men’s furnishings. Penney’s called him back over the Christmas holidays, improbably putting him to work selling menswear