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  "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 seem to hurt the nation's economy, which was in the midst of a great business boom. Coolidge once declared, "The business of America is business," and indeed, from 1921 to 1929, the gross national product soared from $74 billion to $104.4 billion. The buying power of a skilled laborer swelled 50 percent during that period. Bricklayers' wives began wearing silk stockings and the bricklayers themselves bought touring cars.'

  Al Munger had moved the roughly 50 miles from Lincoln to Omaha because it would have been problematic to practice law in his hometown where his father was the only federal judge and a dominant force in the community. Charlie's father practiced law in the same building in downtown Omaha from 1915 to 1959, taking time out to serve as an assistant attorney general and to fulfill his obligations in World War I.

  The Munger family history stretched way back in America, reaching to an ancestor who was among the earliest British settlers in New England. The Munger name derives from the German word monger, a person who sells some commodity, such as fish or iron. At some early point, the Mungers moved from Germany to England and thereafter were increasingly Anglicized.

  The first Munger arrived in America in 1637; Nicholas was a 16-yearold freeman from the county of Surrey, England. He settled in Guilford, Connecticut, where the family farm proved boggy and unproductive, so the Mungers moved from one disappointing farmstead to another, hoping to improve their fortunes. Over time, the family migrated West, with some landing in the Territory of Nebraska.

  "Among us not many great, not many mighty, but most belonging to the reliable `middle class,' the strength of a nation," wrote a Munger family historian. "Some few have cast considerable luster on the family name. Among these I class the sturdy pioneer, those who fought in the Colonial Wars, the Revolution, and in the War for the Union, aren't they worthy?"3

  One of these Nebraska Mungers became a teacher and married a school marm. Teachers earned a pittance in the early days of this country and the family was extremely poor. Nonetheless, one of their two sons became a doctor and the other, Charlie's grandfather, became a lawyer and later a judge.

  Charlie's grandfather, judge T.C. Munger, was influenced all his life by his early poverty. He would frequently recall being sent to the butcher with a nickel to buy the parts of the animal others would not eat. He had to leave college after one year for lack of funds and thereafter educated himself, using books and self-discipline. Even so, he rose to a position of influence, all the while holding to the beliefs and characteristics of his pioneer forbears. Judge Munger was determined to move the family as far as possible from the hard-scrabble life his parents had experienced. "He wanted not to be poor," recalled Charlie. "Self-sufficiency and hard work would be his salvation. My grandparents thought Robinson Crusoe was a great moral work. They forced their children to react it, and my grandmother read it to me. That generation admired the conquering of nature through discipline."

  Molly Munger, who takes a great interest in family lore, explained that "Judge was anti-gambling, anti-saloon. Financially conservative. Underspending his income. Making money by lending money to the good German farmer, the good German butcher. As a judge he was a progressive. It was a big deal to be a federal judge. There weren't many back then."

  Indeed, in 1907 Judge Munger's name made a headline in the Lincoln newspaper. "Bar president takes train to D.C. to visit President." In 1939, the Omaha World Herald printed a feature article about judge Munger, who was celebrating both the fifty-fourth anniversary of his admission to the bar and the beginning of his thirty-third year as a United States District judge. Judge Munger, who was 77 at the time the article was published, was then the second-oldest federal judge in service. He was appointed to the bench in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt, after having served in the state legislature and as county attorney of Lancaster County.

  "Back in the harness after a vacation in Mexico, Judge Munger is not unduly elated by this anniversary, and is digging into his work as usual. The routine cases he ordinarily hears will be interrupted with a more exciting job when he goes to Hastings to preside in a kidnaping trial Monday."4

  According to the Omaha World-Herald, "He firmly believes that work is the best way to keep young." His bright blue eyes snap when he says, "I call myself a member of the present generation because I feel that way, and let it go at that."5

  Among Judge Munger's most memorable cases was a train robbery that took place west of Omaha shortly after he took the bench and the prosecution of a group of Nebraskans accused of staking fraudulent homesteads.

  "He has a reputation for giving juries more thorough instructions than any other judge in the middle west." the writer noted'

  Certainly the standards were high in the Munger and Russell families-Charlie's two sets of grandparents. The Mungers were Presbyterians and pillars of the church; the Russells were New England style Emersonian Unitarians and a little more irregular in church attendance.

  Carol Estabrook says that despite Toody Munger's free-thinking family history, she tried to instill religion in her children. "We were brought up under strict ethical standards, in the Unitarian Church. Dad seldom went. Mother dragged us until we wouldn't go any more." "Ultimately," said Estabrook, "our ethical training came from our parents, our grandfather."

  "I had four aunts, my only blood aunts, every single one a Phi Beta Kappa," explained Charlie. "On my mother's side the religion was that of New England style intellectuals, but their religious organization is now a left-wing political movement and the Russell descendants are Unitarians no more."

  The Washington Post's Katharine Graham said she once received a letter from Charlie in which he told about the moral rectitude of his Aunt "Oofie," his father's older sister. "Oofie" was taught by her father, the judge, never to flinch and always do her duty well. Indeed, she became "Oofie" instead of "Ruth" because at a young age she mastered the delivery of long and complex bedtime prayers. After hearing these prayers, her younger brother Al, who had trouble pronouncing consonants, would then say "Dear God, mine's just like Oofie's."

  As an adult, Aunt Oofie was so dutiful that after her husband died, she viewed his autopsy.

  Her nephew Charlie adored Oofie, partly because her standards were so extreme that she amused him. But even Charlie was floored by Oofie's reaction to .judge Munger's sudden death at age 80. just before he died, Oofie noticed that her father had made a mistake in arithmetic. She said to Charlie: "It was God's grace to take judge, knowing he wouldn't have wanted to stay on and make errors."

  From the Russells and the Mungers, Charlie inherited both intellectual and physical hardiness. In addition to the judge's longevity, Charlie's great-grandfather on his mother's side lived to age 87 and his wife lived to be 82.

  Florence Russell Munger's maternal grandparents, the Inghams, were among the first citizens of Algona, Iowa. Captain Ingham brought his young wife to Iowa, and the couple lived at first in a "sodhouse," which was nothing more than a cave. The captain loved to relate stories about his pioneer days, whereas his wife would only say: "They were mean, hard days and I don't like to think about them."

  Much later, Captain Ingham came to operate the most prosperous bank in Algona and accumulated tracts of farm land. He became affluent enough so that when the industrialist Andrew Carnegie offered to pay half the c
ost of a town library, Ingham, at the insistence of his wife, put up the other half.

  A fisherman, his 150-pound tarpon was carefully preserved by a taxidermist and hung in the basement of Algona's library, no doubt, a condition of his gift. He also had been a dedicated hunter, but when lie accidentally killed his beloved hunting dog Frank, he gave up hunting forever.

  "A strong personality," said Charlie. "He'd fought in the Indian wars, thus becoming Captain Ingham. Every year the cousins used to come to Algona-his many grandchildren and live there, a lot like Star Island. Mother and her sisters came. They staved and lived in his house all summer, year after year."

  Captain Ingham impressed his grandchildren by rapidly making "magic squares," wherein all straight lines of big numbers added to the same sum, no matter what the direction of the line. Captain Ingham shared this mathematical addiction with Benjamin Franklin and said he made the squares "to rest my mind."

  Captain Ingham's son Harvey became it crusading newspaper editor and a meticulous recorder of family history. Toody Munger was particularly fond of one sentence in her Uncle Harvey's description of the Inghams: "There was plenty of plain living and high thinking in the old house."

  Nellie Ingham, one of Captain Ingham's daughters married Charlie Russell. She was Charlie's grandmother.

  Toody Russell's' family had been affluent much longer than the Mungers had been, and yet they were politically left of the Mungers. They called themselves "Wilsonian Democrats." The Inghams side of the family originally came from the Seneca Falls area of New York state which was famous for it's early anti-slavery, pro-women's suffrage attitudes, and the Inghams pushed similar ideas in Iowa. Despite the Mungers' more conservative ways, they respected Toody's family.

  "Toddy was the real deal," said Molly Munger. "They thought she was an elegant girl from a lovely family. Beautiful, very funny, smart in a quick, witty way. A happy person who laughed it lot. Educated at Smith College, she had a college-educated great uncle at the time of the Civil War. Her grandmother's mother, Caroline Rice, had a prosperous life in upstate New York. She was connected. She grew up in a mansion. Horse and carriage, long clothes. Very unlike the Mungers."

  In turn, body 's family approved of her choice of a husband. When pretty, charming Florence announced that she would be marrying Al Munger, who stood 5 feet, 5' inches tall and wore thick glasses, her grandmother Russell observed, "Whoever would have thought she had the sense?"

  For years after his father died, Charlie carried Al Munger's briefcase to work. He had it engraved "Alfred C. Munger 1891-1959. Charles T. Munger 1924-." He no doubt liked the briefcase, but it also served as homage to a loyal and supportive father. Although Al Munger was by any measure a successful and respected attorney, "I think it's fair to say Al never achieved the height his son did," said Molly. "His greatest achievement was Charlie-a prodigy-a lively, energetic, funny little boy. Grampa Al just threw himself into his son. He adored him and they were very close. My father sort of wore my grandfather's colors. My father was very anxious to make his father proud of him."

  "Al Munger," said Charlie, "was one of the happiest men who ever lived and achieved exactly what he wished to achieve, no more or less. He faced all troubles with less fuss than either his father or his son, each of whom spent considerable time foreseeing troubles that never happened. He had exactly the marriage and family life that was his highest hope. He had pals he loved and who loved him, including one-in-ten-thousand types like Ed Davis and Grant McFayden. He owned the best hunting dog in Nebraska, which meant a lot to him. I don't see my father as less successful in the sense that really matters. He was just differently aimed and lived in a time when lawyers made less money."

  Warren Buffett said that Al and Charlie had none of the tension or jealousy that sometimes muddies a father-son relationship. "Charlie once said that if he'd come home at midnight and said, `Dad, you've got to help me bury this body in the basement,' his father would have gotten up and helped him bury the body. Then the next morning, he would have gone to work on convincing Charlie he'd done something wrong."

  Al Munger always took an interest in his son's hobbies. Then, as Charlie would outgrow them, or lose interest, or go on to some new stage in life, his father would carry the hobbies on. Al subscribed to the American Rifleman magazine until his death because Charlie had first subscribed when he was captain of his high school rifle team. Charlie had joined the rifle team because it seemed the only way he could earn a sports letter. "I hoped to impress the girls with my sports letter, prominently worn on my sweater," said Charlie. "And I did turn heads, but the reason was the girls wondered how a spindly little guy like me could have won a sports letter."

  Long before his son took up shooting, Al Munger was a fisherman and duck hunter. "He loved everything about the out-of-doors," noted Charlie. "To him, heaven was finding a farmstand."

  Al liked catfish and would often drive into the predominantly black neighborhood of Omaha where people kept concrete tanks full of live catfish in their basements.

  "You picked out what you wanted," recalled Charlie. "My father also loved ethnic shops, bakeries. He had a special butcher he went to."

  Though he could not be described as a lavish spender, Al Munger savored just the perfect thing, whatever it was he needed. Al had learned the joy of artful living from his mother. She shopped for the very best coffee beans, then took great pleasure each morning in grinding them for fresh coffee. It was a Tao philosophy, Midwestern style. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tse urged seekers to regard the small as important and to make much of the little. "The little obsessions," Charlie called them.

  WHEN AL ANU Toooy MUNGER WERE FIRST MARRIED, they lived in a home on the North side of Dodge Avenue just a block from Toody's parents. Charlie's father built the little house at 420 41st Street in 1925. A few years later, after the Russells passed away, the Mungers moved to the South side of Dodge Avenue, a long, broad thoroughfare that splits Omaha in two and today is lined by miles of shopping centers. Their next home was at 105 South 55th Street, a double-gabled brick house in the Happy Hollow, University of Nebraska area not far from where Buffett lives today. This is a neighborhood notable for its mature trees, and today, its older homes. In the spring, trails of crocus, tulips, and daffodils rim the sidewalks and driveways and bring patches of purple, yellow, and red to lawns awakening from winter dormancy.

  At the time they moved to the 55th Street house, which they purchased from Omaha pioneer Peter Kiewit, the home was on the western fringe of town. Yet Omaha was small enough that, despite its expanding borders and the cultural and ethnic mix, most people felt part of a single community.

  "In my early boyhood, we lived around Germans in Omaha and there were several German language newspapers. Omaha was very ethnic," Munger recalled. "It was not like the Latinos do today-[back then] they assimilated. There was a big Italian neighborhood, Irish, Bohemians, a packing house district. A lot of pronounced ethnicity. It was a very good town to grow up in, and a good time. There were better behavior standards in school and everywhere else."

  Carol Estabrook agreed, somewhat.

  "In the early days in Omaha, there was a sense of stability, belonging, you were comfortable, but terribly insular," she said. "We were way too unaware of things we should have been more aware of. It was the center of our universe."

  Though the Munger children were sheltered from such things, there was a resurgence of racism in America, and in 1925 the Ku Klux Klan staged a 40,000-man parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Shortly before Charlie was born, there had been a mob lynching in Omaha. The labor movement was on the rise and attempts to unionize or picket a workplace sometimes turned brutal.' Those harsh events did not touch the Munger children.

  "In that clay and age, there was no crime at all," said Carol Estabrook. "No drugs. We'd play outside in the evenings, games like capture the flag, kick the can. Our neighbors put an ice-skating rink in their yard. We went to the movies on Saturday."

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p; By the 1930s, Omaha's exquisite Orpheum Theater had changed from a vaudeville house to a talking-movie theater. "You had to pay as much as a quarter to see a first-run movie there," said Charlie. "I loved all the adventure movies, the Kipling movies, the horror movies, Frankenstein and Dracula. The first movie I remember really well was the original King Kong. I went to it all by myself. I couldn't have been more than eight. I think everyone in my generation who could afford it went to the movies. I loved comedies, loved to laugh. John Anderson, my friend, had a big, booming laugh. Once, in the Orpheum we laughed so hard that the rest of the people in the theater started laughing just because we were."

  In 1977, Berkshire Hathaway moved its annual meeting to the Aksarben (Nebraska spelled backwards) fair grounds-familiar territory for Munger. "I used to come here as a boy for the circus. Now we have a circus of our own."

  CHARLIE, MARY,AND CAROL MANGER all attended Dundee Elementary School and later moved up to Central High School, which is housed in the stately former territorial capital building. Central High was considered one of the 25 top college preparatory schools in the country. Susan Buffett and the Buffett children went through the same schools, though Warren did not. When his father became a congressman, Buffett finished elementary school and attended high school in the Washington, DC area.

  Buffett says he still gets letters from people who went to school with Charlie. "Miss Kiewit was one of his elementary school teachers." She was the sister of the well-known Omaha contractor Peter Kiewit, who later became the first citizen of Nebraska. Miss Kiewit played the organ at the First Presbyterian Church and was a member of Eastern Star. She had taught for 42 years when she retired from the Omaha school system in 1970. "They had great teachers because, for other jobs, there was prejudice against women then," said Buffett. Such talented women later passed over teaching for jobs in other professions.