Shaping the Snowball
Alice Schroeder on the Oracle of Omaha
Episode Two:
The History of Buffet’s Omaha
We are at the Douglas County Historical Society where methods of research for the Snowball was conducted. He had to study the history of Omaha, the whole state of Nebraska and of course, the Buffet family which has resided in this area since 1866 before the Sub war. To my left is Lauren Esposito who is my researcher and also a former colleague at Morgan Stanley and Lauren have worked with on this project throughout. To my right is Gary Rosenberg of the Douglas County Historical Society. Gary was very helpful to us on this project and he and Lauren were always e-mailing and were calling each other, sending documents back and forth as we progress to the whole project.
What we have got here is a group of files that have to do with the Buffet family. The Douglas County Historical Society keeps newspaper clippings. For example I have in front of me a file on Howard Buffet, Warren’s father. In this article, Howard Buffet says that he will try to seek with repeal of the Federal Income Tax Withholding Law. He do not think that it was constitutional. Howard was always making comparisons between historical figures and determine or Franklin, I mean Roosevelt administration, both of whom he abhorred. But we are able to use a lot of these articles which with after file on Warren and on the Buffet family and there early history in order to get a really good sense of the influences that affected Buffet as a child particularly the politics that his father spells and how that might have influenced his thinking.
We also have old newspapers. For example the Omaha being. This book for example is from 1930, the year that Warren was born. Now you can see that it contains very fragile, old pages that give you the atmosphere of the times, not just the particular story that you might be interested in, but also a feel of what it was like to live during the great depression.
If you would look at the one ad, you would see the signs of stress. You would see people selling things. They would be selling their personal possessions and there would be a real sense of urgency about it. You would see stores putting on sales that were clearly bankruptcy sales, emergency sales. You would find legal notices of bank failures. They are treated to be the smaller articles and smaller things.
All the kinds of things that tell you about daily life which give contacts to the book and we used a lot of these kind of material in writing the Snowball.
There were certain books that were very helpful to our research, The Gate City, a History of Omaha, this one that we really liked, also one that is called A Dirty Wicked Town, Tales of 19th Century Omaha because Omaha was sometimes referred to as a rogue’s rookery in its early years. We also noted the news about things like kidnappings, bank robberies and the extraordinary weather that took place during the drought years which occurred then where temperatures were routinely over 110 degrees and that gave us a sense of what it was like to be a child during that era when of course, Nebraskans were trained to take these sort of things in stride and to them, it was just part of the back drop of everyday life and one remembers the fun play and does not think of it as anything out of the ordinary.
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