The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [8]
After the breakfast buffet, Clarke Keough walked to the podium. Buffett had known the Keough family for many years; they had been neighbors back in Omaha. It was through Clarke’s father, Don, that Buffett had made the connections that led him to Sun Valley. Don Keough, now chairman of Allen & Co. and former president of Coca-Cola, had met Herbert Allen when he bought Columbia Pictures from Allen & Co. for Coca-Cola in 1982. Keough and his boss, Coca-Cola’s CEO, Roberto Goizueta, had been so impressed by Herbert Allen’s unsalesmanlike approach to selling that they had convinced him to join their board.
Keough, a Sioux City cattleman’s son and former altar boy, had now technically retired from Coca-Cola but he still lived and breathed the Real Thing, so powerful he was sometimes called the company’s shadow chief executive.15
When the Keoughs were his neighbors in Omaha in the 1950s, Warren had asked Don how he was going to pay for his kids’ college and suggested that he invest $10,000 in Buffett’s partnership. But Don was putting six kids through parochial school on $200 a week as a Butter-Nut coffee salesman. “We didn’t have the money,” his son Clarke now told the audience. “This is part of my family’s past that we will never forget.”
Buffett joined Clarke at the podium, wearing his favorite Nebraska red sweater over a plaid shirt. He finished the story.16
“The Keoughs were wonderful neighbors,” he said. “It’s true that occasionally Don would mention that, unlike me, he had a job, but the relationship was terrific. One time my wife, Susie, went over and did the proverbial Midwestern bit of asking to borrow a cup of sugar, and Don’s wife, Mickie, gave her a whole sack. When I heard about that, I decided to go over to the Keoughs’ that night myself. I said to Don, ‘Why don’t you give me twenty-five thousand dollars for the partnership to invest?’ And the Keough family stiffened a little bit at that point, and I was rejected.
“I came back sometime later and asked for the ten thousand dollars Clarke referred to and got a similar result. But I wasn’t proud. So I returned at a later time and asked for five thousand dollars. And at that point, I got rejected again.
“So one night, in the summer of 1962, I started heading over to the Keough house. I don’t know whether I would have dropped it to twenty-five hundred dollars or not, but by the time I got to the Keough household, the whole place was dark, silent. There wasn’t a thing to see. But I knew what was going on. I knew that Don and Mickie were hiding upstairs, so I didn’t leave.
“I rang that doorbell. I knocked. Nothing happened. But Don and Mickie were upstairs, and it was pitch-black.
“Too dark to read, and too early to go to sleep. And I remember that day as if it were yesterday. That was June twenty-first, 1962.
“Clarke, when were you born?”
“March twenty-first, 1963.”
“It’s little things like that that history turns on. So you should be glad they didn’t give me the ten thousand dollars.”
Having charmed the audience with this little piece of give and take, Buffett turned to the matter at hand. “Now, I’m going to attempt to multitask today. Herb told me to include a few slides. ‘Show you’re with it,’ he said. When Herb says something, it’s practically an order in the Buffett household.” Speeding past exactly what comprised “the Buffett household”—for Buffett thought of his household as being like any other family’s—he