The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [89]
As Susie grew older, she retained her girlish round cheeks and a breathy, deceptively childlike voice. During her teens she went to Omaha’s Central High, an integrated school with a student body of different faiths and colors, unusual in the 1940s. Even though she was part of a crowd that some considered snobbish, her classmates recall her as having friends among all these groups.20 Her exuberant warmth and her ethereal way of speaking could come across as “a little phony,” even “a little loopy,”21 but her friends said there wasn’t anything phony about her. Her interests ran to speech and performing arts rather than academics. She argued with passion and persuasiveness on the Central High debate team, where people noticed that her politics had strayed far from her father’s. She acted charmingly in school plays and sang in a smooth contralto in school operettas and as a mainstay of the choir. Her performance as the sweetly harebrained lead in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay so sparkled that her teachers recalled it for years afterward.22 Indeed, her charm and strength of personality made her “Most Popular,” a “lady in waiting” to the school sweetheart, Miss Central, and led her classmates to elect her senior class president.
Susie’s first boyfriend was John Gillmore, a quiet, bland boy whom she openly adored. By the time he became her steady at Central High, Gillmore towered over her by almost a foot, but despite her “kittenish” demeanor, she dominated him.23
During those years, she also began dating a friendly, intelligent boy she had met at a freshman debate competition. A student at Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha, Milton Brown was a tall, dark-haired young man with a warm, wide smile. They saw each other several times a week throughout high school.24 While her close friends were aware of Milt, it was Gillmore who continued to be her steady date for parties and school events.
Susie’s father did not approve of Brown, who was the son of an unschooled Russian-Jewish immigrant worker on the Union Pacific Railroad. The three or four times that she dared to bring him to the house, he was made to feel unwelcome by Doc Thompson, who lectured him about FDR and Truman. Susie’s father made no secret of his determination to pry his daughter loose from dating a Jew.25 Like the Buffetts, Doc Thompson had all the prejudices typical of Omaha, where different ethnic and religious groups kept to themselves, and life for a couple of mixed religion would be taxing at best. Yet Susie dared to cross these social lines—while at the same time managing to maintain another life as a conventional, popular high school girl.
Susie navigated these choppy waters until she went to college, when she and Milt headed off to freedom—together—at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. There she roomed with Bertie Buffett, and both pledged sororities. Bertie coasted through her classes, and was immediately crowned as the Phi Delt “Pajama Queen.”26 Susie, a journalism major, had arranged her schedule so that she could see Milt nearly every day.
The two joined the Wildcat Council together and met at the library after he got off one of the several jobs he held after school to pay his tuition.27 Susie’s unconventional choice to openly date a Jewish boy clashed with her life as a typical coed, and members of her sorority forbade her to bring Brown to a dance because he had pledged a Jewish fraternity. Susie, although hurt, did not depledge.28 But she and Milt began to study Zen Buddhism, looking for a faith that could reflect their common spiritual beliefs.29
Knowing nothing of this, Warren made his futile Thanksgiving trip to Evanston, then visited Susie in Omaha over the winter holidays. By then he had made up his mind to pursue her seriously. She had the qualities he’d always