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to help Warren. The story has been a little stretched," admitted
Guerin. "We know Warren was going to live with or without me. I've
often said since, if he were in real trouble, I'd have made a deal before I
helped him get a life preserver. I'd have been chairman of Berkshire Hathaway! "
    That mishap, concluded Guerin, is why Charlie's friends sometimes
call him Admiral Munger. Despite the misadventure, Guerin says that the
time he spent at Cass Lake that summer was an invaluable first step in his
recovery from grief. He says it showed him that Munger and Buffett were
more than just business associates.
    "Warren gave me the greatest gift he could possibly give: Three days
of his time. And Charlie gave that, too. We try to be realistic and smart
and logical all the time, but there is another side to it."
    The way Buffett reacted to the boating accident was typical of the
business relationship between him and Munger. "Even when I took him
fishing in Minnesota and upset the boat and we had to swim to shore, he
didn't scream at me," said Munger.4
    One of Munger's children noted, however, that the ill-fated fishing
trip was the last time Buffett ever joined the family at Cass Lake.
    Munger said there was another reason Buffett never returned: "After
dunking him in the lake, we tried to cheer him up by making him watch
a bunch of high school students perform Moliere in a Bemidji tent."
Moliere, even if delivered professionally, is not Buffett's style.

     

C H A P T E R T H R E E

THE NEBRASKANS

    An increased percentage of people come from Nebraska. Some
people say they are from Nebraska when they aren't, for status reasons.
    Warren Buffett, 1997 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting
    UNDREDS OF THOUSAND OF PIONEERS, heading west to the Oregon
-and Mormon Trails, passed through Nebraska in the nineteenth
century. Omaha was a gateway to the vast, rich lands beyond the
Missouri River, and the ruts left by the wagon trains are visible in Nebraska farm fields more than 150 years later. Omaha was so rough and
primitive back then that one of Charlie Munger's grandmothers for a
while refused to live there; it was too far from the sophistication of her
native Iowa.
    "Mother's parents moved to a job in Omaha, "said Carol Munger
Estabrook, "but our grandmother insisted on living in Council Bluffs,
Iowa. It's now full of casinos and strip joints. But back then, Nebraska
was considered more of a frontier than Iowa."
    Omaha has improved, but living in Nebraska still is a characterbuilding experience. Temperatures can hit more than 100 degrees
Fahrenheit in the summer and plummet to 40 below zero in the winter.
Two big rivers, the Platte and the Missouri merge in Omaha, and melting
snows can produce early spring floods.
    There are many Nebraskans of notable character, including the creator of modern rodeo, Buffalo Bill Cody; novelist Willa Cather; former U.S.
President Gerald B. Ford; entertainers Henry Fonda, Johnny Carson,
Marlon Brando, Nick Nolte, and Fred Astaire; and civil rights activist
Malcolm X.'
    Munger says he owes a lot to Omaha, the community in which he was
raised. He paraphrases an old saying, "they can take the boy out of Omaha
but not Omaha out of the boy."

    "Charlie tries to make the point that he is the way he is because he
grew up in Omaha," said Munger's daughter Wendy. "But Warren says he
doesn't think so. There weren't any others like Charlie in Omaha."
    The first child and only son of Omaha lawyer Alfred C. Munger and
his wife Florence (Toody), Charlie came into the world during the "Roaring Twenties," four years after the Volstead Act brought the prohibition
of alcoholic beverages to America and four years before penicillin was
discovered.
    Calvin Coolidge was president, replacing Warren G. Harding who
had died in office a year earlier of a heart attack. Perhaps worried that the
same fate would befall him, Coolidge took a two- to three-hour nap each
day. His restful habits didn't