Becoming Warren Buffett Page #2

when I moved in in 1962...

you can see this...

I went down

to the South Omaha Library,

and I think for a dollar,

I got seven copies

of old "New York Times"

from big times like

the Panic of 1907.

This is one...

1929 obviously.

But I wanted

to put on the walls

days of extreme panic

in Wall Street,

just as a reminder that anything

can happen in this world.

I mean it...

it's instructive art

you can call it.

I was born in 1930

here in Omaha, Nebraska,

during the stock market crash.

My dad lost his job in 1931,

a year after I was born.

He was a stock salesman,

and he had what little savings

he had in the bank,

and so he started

his own company.

He worked right through

the depression.

Bertie Buffett:

He had an investment company,

and as an adult

when I looked back,

I thought, "Wow, did that ever

take a lot of nerve."

Sometimes we'd

go down there on Sunday,

and we could play

with the adding machine.

My brother and I tended

to play the games together.

And I remember

at one point he said to me,

"I'm going to be a millionaire by the

time I'm... 30," or something like that.

It was totally outside of anything

my family had experienced,

but he just was

unusual that way.

Doris Buffett:

Well, I was the oldest,

and then my brother

and then my sister.

And my father would go

to New York periodically

to check on businesses,

stocks, and things like that,

and he'd come back,

he'd always have a costume

for each of us,

and Warren loved it.

He was very good-natured.

He was quiet.

It was hard to tell

he was a genius at that point,

but I mean,

who was looking?

Warren:

The first books I read on investment

were actually

in my dad's office.

Pretty soon, I read

all the books in the office

and read some of them

more than once.

My dad had

various nicknames for me.

He'd call me

"Fireball" sometimes,

because I'd start

little businesses.

He didn't care

about money at all.

He believed very much

in having an inner scorecard

and never worry about what other

people are thinking about you.

You know, just... just...

if you know why you're doing what

you're doing, that's good enough.

I admired everything

about him to the extent

that I was absorbing lessons

from him without knowing it.

And the idea that all lives have

equal value is something that

all three of his children

felt since I can remember.

My dad at one point

ran for congress

when I was 12 or so.

It was

a very republican household.

I campaigned for him.

My sisters campaigned for him.

The whole family did.

My mother was

very, very bright,

and she was very gregarious.

She was a good campaigner for my dad.

Bertie:

She had a lot of ambition,

and I think

my brother Warren got a lot

of his extreme competitiveness

from my mother, actually.

Doris:

She was brilliant at math.

You know, I guess

they still had these things

where you crank them

and things added up,

and she could add it in her head

faster than the machine could do it.

She was

absolutely amazing in that.

Warren:
She was very dutiful

about taking care of the kids,

but you didn't get

the same feeling of... of love.

It was there, but it just... it didn't

come out the same way as with my dad.

Howard Buffett, Sr. on radio:

In the nation, the only permanent way

to prosperity is

a balanced budget.

Unless that goal

is achieved,

all post-war plans will collapse

like Hitler's conquest.

Man on radio:
You have heard

Congressman Howard L.H. Buffett,

a Republican member

of the House of Representatives

from Nebraska

speaking on the...

Warren:

When I was about 12 or 13,

we moved to Washington,

my family, and I was mad.

I was having fun in Omaha,

and I lost all my friends,

and now I moved to a town

where they were all strange,

and so I was very,

very unhappy.

At school,

I just lost interest.

I took pleasure

in tormenting my teachers.

At that time for example,

AT&T was the stock

that all teachers owned

for their retirement,

and I decided that it would

drive my teachers a little crazy

if I went and short the stock,

because when you go short a stock,

you're betting

that it will go down.

So I shorted

10 shares of AT&T,

and then brought

the confirmation to school

and showed these teachers

I was shorting the stock.

They found me

a big pain in the neck,

but they did think I knew

a lot about stocks.

And then at home,

my mother would have terrific headaches,

and you didn't want to be around her

when she was having the headaches,

and she would... she would lash out more.

She would never do it in public.

Doris:
Well,

I think we were terrified of her.

When I'd wake up

in the morning,

I'd listen to hear her voice.

I could tell by her voice

if it was going to be

a terrible day or not.

Warren:
When she got difficult,

the three children felt it.

When I was at the low point, sort of,

I decided that I would run away.

So I talked two other guys

into running away with me.

We went out,

and we start hitchhiking...

and then we got picked up

by the highway patrol

and that scared

the hell out of us.

It's very interesting. My dad never

really gave me hell about doing this,

but he finally said,

"You know,"

he said,

"you can do better than this."

And just saying that,

I mean, I...

I felt like I was

letting him down, basically.

So in all ways,

he was teaching me.

Never taught

by telling me things,

he just taught by example.

He had unlimited confidence in me,

even when I screwed up,

and that takes you

a long, long way.

The best gift

I was ever given

was to have the father

that I had when I was born.

I didn't want to go to college.

I was 16 when I got out of high school

and I was buying stocks.

I mean,

I actually was having a pretty good time

and I didn't see that really was much

to be gained by going to college,

but my dad

kind of jollied me into it.

Doris:

He had a roommate who was a friend of mine,

and the roommate said

it would just drive him crazy,

because he studied

all the time,

and Warren would come in

15 minutes before the exam

and just ace his way

through it.

Warren:
I finished in three years,

'cause I had enough credits,

and I was in a hurry.

I wanted to get out.

Warren:

When I got out of the University of Nebraska,

I applied

to Harvard Business school.

They told me I was to get

interviewed in a place near Chicago.

I got there,

and he interviewed me for about 10 minutes,

and he said, "Forget it."

"You're not going

to Harvard."

And so now I'm thinking,

"What do I tell my dad?

Oh, this is terrible."

And it turned out to be

the best thing

that ever happened to me.

Later that summer,

I was looking

through a catalog

and in the catalog, it had these

names of people that were teaching,

and one was Graham

and another was Dodd.

I had read this book

by the two of them,

so I wrote him a letter

in mid-August,

and I said,

"Dear Professor Dodd,"

I said, "I thought

you guys were dead."

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