“That was my grandfather,” Warren says. “‘I’ll just let the bill run.’” It wasn’t that Ernest didn’t love his family, “you just wished he showed it a little more often.”
“I guess you’d better go back on home to West Point,” Howard told his wife. “At least you’ll have three meals a day.” But Leila stayed. She walked to Robert’s Dairy to pay the bill rather than pay a streetcar fare. She started skipping her church circle because she couldn’t afford the twenty-nine cents for her turn at bringing coffee.7 Rather than run up a tab at the family store, she sometimes went without to make sure Howard was fed.8
One Saturday, two weeks before Warren’s first birthday, people stood on line downtown, dripping with sweat in the hundred-degree heat, waiting to reclaim their cash from the shaky custody of the local banks. They shuffled forward from early morning until ten p.m. and counted and recounted the people ahead in line, silently repeating a financial rosary: Please, God, let there be money left when it’s my turn.9
Not every prayer was heard. Four state banks closed their doors that month, leaving their depositors unpaid. One of them was Howard Buffett’s employer, the Union State Bank.10 Warren repeats the family legend: “On August 15, 1931, he went down to the bank. It was two days after his birthday, and the bank was closed. He had no job, and his money was in the bank. He had two little kids to feed.11 He didn’t know what to do. There was not another job to find.”
But within two weeks Howard and two partners, Carl Falk and George Sklenicka, filed the papers to start a stockbrokerage firm, Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.12 It was a maverick decision—to open a stockbroking business at a time when no one wanted to buy stocks.
Three weeks later, England went off the “gold standard.”*5 This meant that, to avoid bankruptcy, the country—which was deep in debt—would simply print more money to pay off its loans. This is a neat trick that only a government can pull off. It was as if the country with the most widely trusted and accepted currency of the age announced: “We are going to write bad checks, and you can take them or else.” The announcement instantly exploded trust in formerly gilt-edged institutions. All over the world, financial markets plunged.
The already sputtering United States economy coughed, then stalled, then plummeted into free fall. A rush of banks was sucked into its trailing vacuum and collapsed. In city after city, depositors fought their way to the teller’s window and were turned away.13 But in the middle of this maelstrom, Howard’s business was succeeding. His clients at first were mostly family friends. He sold them safe securities like utility stocks and municipal bonds. In the firm’s first month of operation, as financial panic spread around the world, he produced $400 of commissions and the firm was profitable.14 Through the ensuing months, even as people’s savings evaporated and faith in banks disappeared, Howard stuck to the same kind of conservative investments that had gotten him started, steadily adding customers and growing his business.15
The family’s fortunes had turned around. Then, shortly before Warren’s second birthday, twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped and murdered in March 1932. The snatching of the “Lone Eagle’s” baby was “the biggest story since the Resurrection,” according to pundit H. L. Mencken. The country flew into a kidnapping paranoia in which parents conveyed their terror of abduction to their children, the Buffetts being no exception.16 Around then, Howard suffered some kind of attack serious enough for Leila to call an ambulance. The Mayo Clinic eventually diagnosed him with a heart condition.17 From that time on, he lived with restrictions: He wasn’t supposed to lift things, run, swim. Leila, whose life now revolved entirely around Howard, the Prince Charming who had rescued her from the miserable fate of running a Linotype press, must have been terrified at the thought of anything happening to him.
Warren was already a cautious child, who had kept his knees bent and stayed close to the ground when he learned to walk. Now, when his mother took him to her church circle meetings, he was content to sit placidly at her feet. She diverted him with an improvised toy—a toothbrush. Warren gazed quietly at the toothbrush for two hours at a stretch.18 What could he have been thinking as he stared at its columns and rows of bristles?
That November, with the country in crisis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President. Howard was certain this man of privilege who knew nothing of the common people would pollute the country’s currency and drive it to ruination.19 He stuck a big sack of sugar in the attic to prepare for the worst. By this time, Howard looked like a boyish Clark Kent in a business suit, nearsighted behind his wire-rimmed glasses, with receding dark hair, an earnest smile, and a genial manner. But he turned thunderous when it came to politics, reviewing the news of the day at top volume over dinner. Doris and Warren probably had no idea what Howard meant as he ranted about the horrors that would befall the country now that a Democrat occupied the White House. But terms like “socialism” started to embed themselves in the children’s minds. After dinner, they watched their awe-inspiring father retire to his red leather armchair in the living room next to the radio and disappear for hours behind his nightly newspaper and magazines.
Politics, money, and philosophy were acceptable topics for dinner-table discussion at the Buffett house, but feelings were not.20 Even in an era of undemonstrative parents, Howard and Leila were notable for their lack of warmth. Nobody in the Buffett household said “I love you,” and nobody tucked the children into bed with a kiss.
But to everyone outside the family, Leila appeared the perfect mother and wife. People called her peppy, upbeat, motherly, sweet, even “a gusher.”21 In repeating her history, as she was fond of doing, she painted out the awkward bits, describing herself as a fortunate person brought up by wonderful Christian parents. Her favorite stories told of her and Howard’s sacrifices—the three years of school she had missed to earn her college money, the four months Howard had gone without making a sale when he first started his business, walking to the dairy to save streetcar fare. Leila referred often to bouts of “neuralgia” (sometimes mistaken for migraines), which she attributed to the childhood years spent alongside the pounding Linotype.22 Nevertheless, she acted as though she must do everything and drove herself hard—bridge teas and steak fries, birthdays and anniversaries, calling on neighbors and cooking for church suppers. She paid more visits, baked more cookies, and wrote more notes than anyone. When pregnant, she once cooked dinner by herself for the family while trying to quell her morning sickness by smelling a bar of soap.23 Above all her attitude was: anything for Howard. “She crucified herself,” said her sister-in-law Katie Buffett.24
But Leila’s attitude of duty and sacrifice had another, darker, side: blame and shame. After Howard left on the streetcar for work in the morning, Doris and Warren would be playing or getting dressed and suddenly Leila might explode at them. Something in the tone of her voice might give a clue that the fuse was lit, but most of the time there was no warning.
“It was always something that we did or said, and there would be this flash, and then it didn’t subside. All your past sins would be brought up. It was just endless. And my mother attributed it sometimes to having neuralgia, but she never showed that outwardly.”
When in a rage, Leila would verbally lash the children over and over again, always the same: their lives were easy compared to her sacrifices; that they were worthless, ungrateful, and selfish; and should feel ashamed. She would pick at every real and imagined flaw; she nearly always aimed the tirade at Doris, and carried on saying the same things for at least an hour, sometimes as long as two. She never stopped until both children “just folded,” says Warren, weeping helplessly. “She was not content until she reduced you to tears,” says Doris. Warren was forced to watch her explosions, unable to protect his sister and desperate to avoid being targeted himself. While it was apparent that her attacks were deliberate and she had some degree of control over them, it isn’t at all clear how she perceived her behavior as a parent. But no matter what she thought s
he was doing, by the time Warren was three years old and their sister Roberta, known as Bertie, was born, “it couldn’t be put back together,” he says, for him or for Doris. The damage to their souls was done.
The children never asked for help from their father, even though they knew that he was aware of Leila’s eruptions. Howard might say to them, “Mom’s on the warpath,” a tipoff that a rage was coming, but he didn’t intervene. Usually, however, Leila’s explosions took place out of Howard’s earshot, and they were never aimed at him. In a sense, therefore, he was the children’s protector. Even though he did not save them, Howard still meant security, because when he was around, they were safe.
Outside the tidy white bungalow on Barker Avenue, Nebraska was sliding into lawlessness. Bootlegging flourished in Omaha until Warren was three years old.25 Out in the countryside, farmers faced with foreclosure on mortgages backed by nearly worthless farmland rose up in civil disobedience.26 Five thousand farmers marched on the state capitol in Lincoln until panicked lawmakers hastily passed a mortgage moratorium bill.27
As the cold winds scoured the parched western sand hills in November of 1933, they kicked up vast swirls of topsoil in towering black clouds that swept eastward as far as New York City at a clipper speed of sixty miles per hour. The gale shattered plate-glass windows and blasted cars off the road in its wake. The New York Times compared it to the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. The dust-storm years had begun.28
In the middle of the worst drought of the twentieth century, Midwesterners took refuge in their homes as grit sandblasted the paint and pitted the glass on their automobiles. Leila swept red dust off the porch every morning. On Warren’s fourth birthday, a cloud of ruddy dust buried the Buffetts’ front porch and the wind blew the paper plates and napkins off the party table.29
Along with the dust came years of extraordinary heat. In summertime 1934 the thermometer in Omaha hit 118 degrees. After searching for days, a Nebraska farmer found his cow down a crack in a remote stubble field, trapped when the parched earth split apart.30 Plainsmen told tall tales about someone who fainted dead away when hit in the face by a drop of water and had to be revived with three buckets of sand. People slept in their backyards, camped on the grounds of Central High School, and on the grassy lawn of Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum, so as not to roast in the ovens of their own homes. Warren tried in vain to sleep covered in bedsheets soaked with water, but nothing could cool the baked air that steamed up to his second-story room.
With the record drought and heat of 1934,31 millions of grasshoppers arrived to devour the parched corn and wheat down to stubble.32 Leila’s father, John Stahl, suffered a stroke that year, and while visiting his grandfather in West Point, Warren could hear the background drone of the ravenous hoppers. At their worst, they consumed fence posts, the laundry on the clothesline, and finally one another, gumming up tractor engines and clouding the air, thick enough to obscure a car.33
In truth, the early 1930s brought many other things to fear than fear itself.34 The economy worsened. Imitators of the era’s most notorious gangsters—Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson—roamed the Midwest, pillaging the already vulnerable banks.35 Parents worried about the dust-bowl drifters and gypsies who passed through town. Occasional “mad dog” rabies scares quarantined children at home. The public swimming pools closed in the dog days of summer out of fear of “infantile paralysis”—polio—and parents warned their children constantly that if their lips touched the public water fountain, it could put them in an iron lung.36
Yet Nebraskans were trained from birth to respond to calamity with teeth-gritted optimism. Those years of dust and drought simply formed the backdrop to Midwestern life. The children grew up accustomed to outlandish weather in a state plagued with tornadoes and winds strong enough to blow a train from its tracks.37
The three little Buffetts went to school, played with friends, and ran around with a dozen kids in hundred-degree weather at neighborhood potluck picnics, their fathers in suits and their mothers in dresses and stockings.
Many of their neighbors may have suffered, their standard of living in decline, but Howard, son of a grocery man, had elevated his family into the more comfortable half of the middle class. “We made steady progress even in those tough times,” he was to recall, “in an extremely modest sort of way.” He was being modest about the family’s modesty. While fifty men stood in line for a $17-a-week job driving the orange Buffett & Son grocery trucks, Howard’s persistence in knocking on doors had made his stockbroking business, now called Buffett & Co., a success.38 Omaha was briefly under martial law during violent streetcar strikes and rioting in 1935, but Howard bought a brand-new Buick. He became active in local Republican politics. At age seven Doris, who had always worshipped her father, contemplated his future biography and wrote in the front of one of her notebooks, Howard Buffett, A Statesman.39 A year later, still in the shadow of the Great Depression, Howard built the family a much larger two-story red-brick Tudor-revival house in Dundee, a suburb of Omaha.40
As the family prepared to move, Leila got word that her brother, Marion, now a successful lawyer in New York, had been stricken with incurable cancer at age thirty-seven. “My uncle Marion was the pride and joy of my mother’s family,” says Buffett, as well as their principal hope to carry on the family name, unsullied by insanity.41 His death that November, childless, devastated his family. The next piece of bad news arrived when Leila’s father, John Stahl, suffered another stroke that year, this one debilitating. Her sister Bernice, who cared for him at home, seemed increasingly sunk in depression. Her other sister, Edie, a schoolteacher, the prettiest and most adventurous of the girls, had vowed to stay single until either her thirties or until Bernice wed, but Leila, sharp and aware, refused to be trapped by her family’s woes. She was going to make it, no matter what; she was going to create a normal life with a normal family.42 She planned the move and bought new furniture. In a major step up in the world, Leila could afford to hire a part-time housekeeper, Ethel Crump.
Now a more experienced mother of a more prosperous family, Leila formed a much healthier relationship with her youngest child, Bertie, as the intervals between her rages lessened. Bertie knew her mother had a temper but says she always felt loved. Warren and Doris never did. And Leila’s obvious affection for Bertie did not help their sense of worthlessness.43
In November 1936, Roosevelt was reelected to a second term. Howard’s only consolation was that FDR would be out in another four years. While he read his conservative journals each night, the children listened to the radio, played games, or sang hymns as Leila accompanied them on the family’s latest acquisition—a pipe organ like the one her own mother had played.
While the Buffetts’ new house and occasional luxuries like the organ reflected their upward progress, Leila always bought her children thrifty, practical, forgettable gifts, clothing bought on sale that couldn’t be returned, and necessities—nothing that answered a child’s fantasies. Warren had a little single-oval HO-gauge train set and coveted a more elaborate version, the kind he saw at the Brandeis department store downtown, which had multiple engines twisting and turning past flashing lights and signals, rising over snow-covered hills and dropping into tunnels, racing past tiny villages and disappearing into pine forests. But the closest he came to owning it was buying the catalog that depicted it.
“If you were a little kid with one little oval track, looking at this thing, it was completely unbelievable. You’d gladly pay a dime for the model-train catalog and just sit there and fantasize.”
An introverted child, Warren could lose himself for hours in a model-train catalog. Sometimes, however, as a preschooler, he “hid,” as he put it, at his friend Jack Frost’s house, developing a babyish “crush” on Jack’s kindhearted mother, Hazel. As time passed, his habit grew of spending much time at neighbors’ and relatives’ houses.44 His favorite relative was his father’s sister Alice, a tall woman who had remained unmarried, lived at home wi
th her father, and taught home economics. Surrounding Warren with warmth, she showed interest in everything he did and was thoughtful about how to motivate him.
By the time Warren entered kindergarten,45 his hobbies and interests revolved around numbers. Around age six, he became fascinated by the precision of measuring time in seconds, and desperately wanted a stopwatch. Alice knew better than to offer such an important gift with no strings. “She was nuts about me,” Buffett says, “but she still would attach a condition or two. I had to eat asparagus or something like that. That was what motivated me. But I got a stopwatch in the end.”
Warren would pick up his stopwatch and summon his sisters to join him in the bathroom they shared to watch the new game he had invented.46 He filled the bathtub with water and picked up his marbles. Each had a name. He lined them up on the flat edge at the back of the tub. Then he clicked the stopwatch just as he swept the marbles into the water. They raced down the porcelain slope, clicking and rattling, jumping as they hit the waterline. The marbles chased each other toward the stopper. When the first one hit, Warren punched the stopwatch and declared the winner. His sisters watched him race the marbles over and over, trying to improve their times. The marbles never tired, the stopwatch never erred, and—unlike his audience—Warren never seemed bored by the repetition.
Warren thought about numbers all the time and everywhere, even in church. He liked the sermons, he was bored by the rest of the service; he passed the time by calculating the life span of hymn composers from their birth and death dates in the hymnals. In his mind, the religious should reap some reward for their faith. He assumed that hymn composers would live longer than average. Living longer than average seemed to him an important goal. But piety, he found, did nothing to improve longevity. Lacking any personal sense of grace, he began to feel skeptical about religion.