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  Munger's three roommates at Caltech also impressed him favorably. One roommate, Henry Magnin, was the son of an influential Reform Jewish rabbi. The second was the son of a music professor famous for teaching prodigies, and another was from a family of well-known scientists and inventors. "They were all Californians. Interesting guys with interesting families," recalled Charlie.

  Following his weatherman training, Munger was dispatched to Alaska, which was cold and dark, but, according to his own account, not particularly dangerous. Charlie noted that his experience contrasted starkly with the dangers to which others were exposed. U.S. casualties in World War II totaled 292,000 dead, 672,000 wounded, and 140,000 taken prisoner or declared missing.

  The war interrupted his education, but it did not have the deeply formative influence on him that it had on others, said Charlie. "I don't think I knew well 15 people who died in World War II. It wasn't like a whole generation of young men died, as the Europeans did in World War I or Americans in the Civil War. I never got near military action. I was stationed in Nome. I couldn't have gotten farther from action."

  Just as Munger had avoided the poverty and degradation of the Depression, he was spared from the battlefield by serving in a vital noncombat job. Nevertheless, his years in the military allowed him to refine what later became an important skill-card playing.

  "Playing poker in the Army and as a young lawyer honed my business skills," said Charlie. "What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don't get a big edge often. Opportunity comes, but it doesn't come often, so seize it when it does come."

  Munger's deployment to Caltech coincidentally overlapped with his sister Mary's enrollment at nearby Scripps College. She introduced Charlie to one of her classmates, a girl named Nancy Huggins, whose family owned a shoe store that catered to the well-heeled residents of Pasadena. The whole nation was in the throes of wartime angst, and young love, under the threat of long or even permanent separation, became highly romanticized. The combination of youth, war, and romance led to predictable consequences.

  "The first Nancy goes to Scripps College-is a lively, pretty girl, from the lively, attractive Huggins clan," explained Molly. "Willful, indulged. She rooms with a much calmer, steadier, bookish girl from Omaha. She has a brother who started [to college] in Michigan. He was sent to Caltech. And they utterly rushed into marriage-he was 21, she 19-no idea of what they were doing, both people of high spirits. Young people in the middle of a war. They made severe mistakes."

  It took several years before it would become apparent that Munger's marriage was a misjudgment. In the meantime, the Mungers did what many young, postwar couples did. They sought additional education on the GI Bill and started a family.

  Though Munger had by now attended several universities and taken advanced courses, he had not earned a college diploma. That did not deter this ambitious 22-year-old. Even before he was discharged from the military in 1946, Charlie, like his father, applied to the nation's oldest and perhaps most distinguished law school, Harvard. Charlie was following a family tradition, but law also seemed the best career choice for him, given his skills, or lack thereof, in certain areas.

  "The Army gave two tests," he explained. "An IQ test and a mechanical aptitude test. I got a radically high score on IQ and a much lower score for mechanical aptitude. That confirmed what I already knew. My spatial talents were not up to my general level of talents. If I'd have gone into surgery when I was young, I wouldn't have been an outstanding surgeon. My father's best friend, Dr. Davis, was a famous surgeon. I could tell he had this vast mechanical ability that I lacked."

  As for his original college major-mathematics-well, Charlie performed admirably in the math classes he'd taken, but he knew he wasn't as talented as his best teachers. He recalled watching his Caltech thermodynamics professor, Homer Joe Stewart, stride into the classroom and spend hours writing very complex equations on the blackboard as fast as his fingers could move, spouting rapid-fire explanations as he went. Charlie realized he never could be as good as that, and for a professor at a prestigious university, it is necessary to be like Homer Joe Stewart. To go into a calling where he would not be exceptional was not in Charlie's thinking.

  Despite the fact that Al Munger had graduated from Harvard Law, Charlie was not welcomed with open arms. "I was admitted over the objection of Dean Warren Abner Seavy through the intervention of family friend Roscoe Pound," Munger said.

  A Nebraska native, Pound was the retired dean of Harvard Law School. Charlie knew from family stories that Pound was a polymathic su- pergenius who, as dean, seldom convened faculty meetings because he figured he could make better decisions by himself. When Munger, faced with rejection, asked to confer with Pound, Seavy warned Charlie that the Dean would agree that he should finish college before going to law school. Munger replied, "We'll see."

  When Charlie called upon him to plead his case, Pound reviewed the transcripts of the work Munger already had completed. After reaching a favorable conclusion, Pound contacted the new law school dean and saw to it that Munger was admitted.'

  Harvard's flexibility proved sound. By the end of Charlie's first year he won a 5400 Sears prize for placing second in his class. Nonetheless, in retrospect, Charlie considered himself prepared enough for Harvard Law, but inadequately prepared for life.

  "I came to Harvard Law School very poorly educated, with desultory work habits and no college degree."3

  At the 75th anniversary celebration of Sec's Candy, Munger and Buffett spent nearly an hour taking questions from the audience. One See's employee asked the two men what their most important school experiences were.

  "I hurried through school," said Munger. "I don't think I'm a fair example Hof an ideal education, and I don't think you are either, Warren. I learn better sort of plowing through written material by myself. I've done a lot of that in my life. I frequently like the eminent dead better than the live teachers."

  Buffett confessed that his main objective in college was "getting out." He was impatient to get on with life and start his career as an investor, though Buffett said that attending graduate school at Columbia University and studying under the legendary investor Benjamin Graham was one of the most important things he did.'

  Charles Munger once described himself as having a black belt in chutzpah, and probably that trait helped him rise to the challenge." He had grown up in the households of a judge and a business lawyer, and had been exposed to lawyerly thinking all of his life. He also was opinionated, almost to the point of arrogance. When a professor called upon him to answer a question that Munger was not prepared for, he responded, "1 haven't read the case, but if you give me the facts, I'll give you the law.

  Munger later came to realize that conversational gambits of that type were foolish and impeded his progress in life. Remembering the incident, Munger says he doesn't know why he behaved so badly, but he thinks it may have been partly due to hereditary factors that he has subdued but not conquered. He has admitted, in fact, that he apparently was behind the door when humility was handed out.

  One of Charlie's Harvard Law classmates, Henry Gross, became a successful investment counselor in Los Angeles, and defended Munger when an acquaintance remarked that prosperity was making Charlie pompous. "Nonsense," said Gross. "I knew him when he was young and poor; he was always pompous."

  Munger can be highly self-assured and sometimes reactive, but what saves him is that his opinions aren't set in stone. James Sinegal, president and chief executive officer for Costco, said Charlie doesn't "have an agenda. If you don't buy off on his viewpoint, he doesn't pout. He's prepared to move on with the conversation."

  While at Harvard, Charlie again had it sister nearby: Carol arrived to study at Radcliffe. "I babysat their first child (Teddy). I fed him his Pablum dry-I was so unfamiliar with babies," said Carol. "He ate it, too. It didn't kill him."

  Molly, the Munger's first daughter, was born
in Massachusetts and was brought home from the hospital to cramped student quarters. "I used to move her crib into the bathtub each night. It was it small crib and fit well," said Charlie.

  At Harvard Charlie was as sociable as he had been in elementary and high school hack in Omaha. He circulated widely among different types of people. Walter Oherer, who later became dean of the law school at the University of Utah, worked with Munger on the Harvard Lain Review. On one occasion, they spent many days in the lower parts of the Widener Library checking citations in it turgid article written by a European scholar. "After about four days Oberer said that our situation reminded him of a time when he was working as a pick-up clay laborer inside box cars in 120-degree heat alongside it tramp who needed money for food. Finally, the tramp threw down a grain sack and walked off saying, 'Fuck this shit. I didn't kill anybody.' Nonetheless, Oberer stayed the course to the end at the Harvard Lain Review. But after a while, I imitated the tramp."

  Munger completed law school in 1948, along with Kingman Brewster who became the president of Yale University, Ed Rothschild, who founded the law firm of Rothschild, Stevens and Barry in Chicago and Joseph Flom, who went on to become it famous lawyer in New York. Charlie was one of 12 in the 335-member class to graduate magna cum laude.

  He talked to his father about returning to Omaha to practice law, but despite the connections that Charlie might enjoy there, Al Munger advised against it. Apparently Al felt that Omaha was too small it pond for Charlie. Even though Omaha was an affluent small city. headquarters to the Union-Pacific Railroad, several agricultural corporations, and numerous insurance companies, Charlie would not be challenged by the practice that he could build there.

  Besides that, Charlie was enchanted by Pasadena and taken with the Californians he'd met. Charlie, Nancy, and their growing family would head hack West.

  Al Munger approved, even though his personal experiences in California had been discouraging. He had visited Los Angeles right after the end of World War I, with a view to possibly relocating there. However, appalled by the lack of water and greenery, he had declared "There's no future in this town." He returned to Nebraska, only to have his son grow up and make the opposite decision.

  Even Munger's own children think it was odd, in some ways, that Charlie would end up such an integral part of the most nontraditional city in the United States.

  "Charlie loves Mark Twain and Ben Franklin. He's Midwestern," observed Barry. "He's definitely not very coastal. But LA was a big growing megalopolis and his business life intersected with that. He didn't move there because he liked to surf. He is a guardian of the mountain."

  Nevertheless, Charlie has a taste for adventure when it comes to homes and friends. To Charlie, Los Angeles was a rational choice.

  " I am not one who usually hates where I am," said Munger. "I liked Albuquerque. I liked Nashville, Tennessee, where I spent some months during the war. I liked Boston, and thought of staying there. But Boston in 1948 was terribly interbred-intermarried. It was a hard town in which to get ahead. In Los Angeles, I would go ahead faster."

  He was right. The growth was amazing. With city limits that encompass 467 square miles, Los Angeles by the end of the twentieth century was home to more than 3.5 million people. And that's only within the city limits. Los Angeles County has 80 incorporated cities and 10 million residents.

  Despite Munger's conservative, Midwestern ways, longtime friend Otis Booth said, "Charlie did not seem to stand out. Los Angeles is full of all kinds of people, and particularly in the early years was peopled by Midwesterners."

  That Southern California was his wife's home may not even have been a consideration: "1 don't remember discussing it with her," said Charlie.

  On the other hand, said Molly Munger, Charlie was intrigued by his wife's entrepreneurial in-laws and didn't mind living near them. "My father always liked my Huggins relatives. He had respect and admiration for what they accomplished with the shoe store. He liked their lifestyle and high spirits. They were successful and positive. He talked about what a good business they had and what a good job they'd done."

  Nancy Huggins, like Charlie himself, was descended from an old New England family, but the Huggins were a different clan from the Mungers. Her great-grandmother, Molly said, was "very smart and hardworking," the first girl in her high school to study algebra. She married shoe salesman Fred Huggins, Molly's great-grandfather, in Pasadena in 1890. At the time, Pasadena was a popular resort for Midwestern millionaires, including the Wrigley chewing gum heirs. The Huggins opened their own store, with her keeping books and Fred selling shoes. Later they branched out to Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. Their main store, on Pasadena's South Lake Avenue was later sold, but Nancy Huggins, an only child, inherited the stock that was issued in the sale. "The stock we took has continued to be valuable," said Molly.

  In addition to their business acumen, the Huggins had a flair for living. "They were hard-drinking, kick up your heels types and married very well," said Molly. "They married up. Their mother bought the sons one tuxedo. They rotated it to go to fancy parties."

  Charlie returned to this lively environment and was admitted to the California Bar in 1949. He joined the Los Angeles law firm of Wright & Garrett, which later became Musick, Peeler & Garrett. The firm had a respected name in the legal community, but was relatively small compared to others in the city. Charlie started out at a salary of $275 a month. He felt fairly affluent at the time, having accumulated $1,500 in savings.s

  Once he was settled in California, Munger went about making connections with the same type of people he would have associated with had he stayed in Omaha.

  For the most part, he stuck close to the law community. Charlie connected with old California families and with Midwesterners seeking to replicate their culture under more favorable weather conditions. Gradually he joined social groups that would help further his connections-the classic downtown men's club, the California Club; the Los Angeles Country Club and the Beach Club.

  CHARLIE'S PARENTS HAD PROTECTED HIM from the sorrows of the Great Depression. With luck he landed far from the battlefields of World War II. But his luck gave out. In the 1950s, the decade considered most felicitous for America, Munger walked unsuspectingly into the darkest experiences of his life.

  "I think I must have been very young when my parents splits," said Wendy Munger. "I don't remember his living in the house, but remember him picking us up on weekends. A divorce is a terrible thing. Teddy died at nine, I was five, Molly seven."

  Because she was older. Molly remembers much of what happened when her parents divorced in 1953. Charlie and the first Nancy had married young and now, "They fought, yelled at each other. It was abundantly clear they weren't happy," explained Molly. And when it was obvious the Mungers could no longer live together, "They handled themselves in a way that was exemplary. They said all the right things. We're not happy with each other. We need to be apart. We love you guys. It won't affect our relationship with you."

  Although she was just a preschooler when her parents' marriage broke up, Wendy Munger felt sure of one thing. The divorce wasn't his doing, but I don't know [why they separated]," said Wendy. "A less wellsuited pair hardly exists on this earth. They were just babies when they married."

  As is the case with so many families, the children didn't fully understand what caused the irreconcilable differences between their parents, one a serious young lawyer and the other a free spirit, but they quickly grasped the consequences of the decision to end the marriage.

  "He lost everything in the divorce," Molly continued. Her mother stayed in the house in South Pasadena, but despite his absence, Charlie went to great lengths to help the children realize that he was still their father and responsible for their well-being.

  "When the divorce happened, Teddy said, I'm going to live with Daddy," Molly recalled. "He didn't."

  Though he was in California, far from those roots, Munger got through that time by following the rules he learned in Oma
ha. "He was living in dreadful bachelor digs at the University Club," said Molly. "But there was not slippage. Every Saturday he was there. Every Saturday he was cheerful. He took us to the zoo, pony rides, took us to see his friends. Divorce in the 1950s was not a normal thing. We were very, very conscious of having a traumatized life compared to what else was going on. He drove this awful car-a yellow Pontiac. He always had great style, expressed it in his clothes but the car made it look as if he had not two pennies to say hello to each other. This yellow Pontiac had a cheap repaint job. I remember going up to the car in the University Club garage, and I said, 'Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?' 'To discourage gold diggers,' he replied."

  Charlie and the first Nancy had been separated a short time when they were told that their son Teddy was gravely ill with leukemia, a disease that had taken the life of Teddy's maternal grandfather. Charlie was stunned by the news. It went against everything that he'd experienced, everything that he'd dreamed. "He knew how to have a boy, be a loving father, and he was going to do it all over again," said Molly, but with Teddy, at least, that wasn't to be.

  When Teddy Munger became ill, Charlie and his wife sought the best medical help they could find. The child had a blood disorder that allowed almost no chance of remission. Today, a child with leukemia has an excellent chance of full recovery.

  "This would he in the early 1950s, you see," said Hal Borthwick. "They didn't really have anything that they could do for leukemia. Nothing. No bone marrow therapy-forget it. Even now, it is not an easy thing, but there are a lot more options. But in those days you just literally sat and watched your kid die by inches."

  First the divorce, then Teddy's illness affected all areas of Munger's life. In those days there was no medical insurance," said Munger. "I just paid all the expenses. You'd have a bonding experience in the leukemia ward. Parents and grandparents were having the same experience. They were all going to lose. In those days it was 100 percent. I've often wondered how professionals are able to steel themselves when dealing time after time with children facing mortality rates so high."