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Despite the constant trips to school conferences, dental appointments, and loads of luggage when they went anywhere, those early years
bonded three families into one.

"Mother treated Molly and Wendy as if they were her own," recalled
Charles, Jr. "Father treated her boys as if they were his own. They forged
a real family."

"He doesn't say children and stepchildren, he simply says we have
eight children," said Wendy Munger. "He doesn't differentiate. That's just
typical. In his treatment of the grandchildren, there is no distinguishing.
He doesn't care at all. It is unimportant to him."

Even the soft-spoken David Borthwick, who bucked the family trend
and became what Charlie calls "a coupon clipper," is deeply grounded in
being a Munger. Molly lived fifteen or more miles away in the suburb
of Pasadena with another set of parents, but she also felt part of her father's life.

"He bought me this car when I was in high school," said Molly. "Here
he was struggling away. But I was driving the Mustang car with the white landau top. I had a clothes allowance. He was always there for me. I felt
completely taken care of. It wasn't just financial. That was nice, but if he
hadn't had that, he would have had something else."

Emilie Munger now has three small children of her own. She said
motherhood has prompted her to wonder how her parents managed to
raise eight successful children who share similar standards and who get
along well together.

"As parents, part of their success was in transmitting values, human
morality, and ethical codes to their children," said Emilie. "It wasn't
through organized religion. We went to Sunday school at the Episcopalian
church. We learned the golden rule, the basic rules. But it almost evolved
through their example. I think he teaches through telling stories about
people who are admirable in his eyes and those who are not. He was not
hovering over us and telling us what was right or wrong with our own
behavior. The siblings truly enjoy one another's company. There is not a
lot of the weird things that can happen between brothers and sisters, parent and child, partly because we're all pretty moral and honest."

The Munger children often harken hack to the lessons they've
learned from growing up around it father with definite ideas of right and
wrong. Hal Borthwick said Charlie drummed in the notion that a person
should always "Do the best that you can do. Never tell a lie. If you say
you're going to do it, get it clone. Nobody gives a shit about an excuse.
Leave for the meeting early. Don't be late, but if you are late, don't bother
giving people excuses. Just apologize. They're due the apology, but
they're not interested in an excuse. By the way, those are very useful
rules, especially for people who have decided to go into service businesses. People are paying for your services with their own money. Return
your calls quickly. The other thing is the five-second no. You've got to
make your mind up. You don't leave people hanging."

"He asked us to do something." recalled Emilie. "If we came hack and
said we couldn't because (of this reason or that), he would send us hack
out to solve the problem and keep our word. Fine tune your judgment."

Nancy agreed that Charlie's limited involvement at home and her acceptance of that seems unusual, but it was typical of their generation. "He
was not much of a helpmate around the house. I always say, he lives in a
lovely hotel that others maintain. He's no potterer."

Nancy worked hard, but the whole family knew Charlie also worked
hard to keep up his end of the domestic bargain. He was in his midthirties, starting his financial life over again, and managing several careers at once. Nancy used to tell their friends that Charlie "was a young
man in a hurry," in a hurry to live a full life, in a hurry to get rich.

He often approached family life much like an executive would deal
with a business situation, Nancy explained. "He was always ready to advise and assist the children, and the opportunity came along fairly often.
When they grew older, however, we tried to limit advice to one or two
important issues."

Though Charlie was reticent about expressing his feelings verbally,
Molly said it was clear that he has always felt deeply about his family. It's
just that a show of feelings might be dangerous.

"He probably feels that if he ever began, he would be overwhelmed
by his emotions," said Molly. "But it's very much there. We all wish he
would show it more up front. They both came from old-fashioned, repressive backgrounds. She's been very understanding and just worked along
with what it is."

In addition to her domesticity, Nancy was Charlie's intellectual
equal, someone with whom he could discuss ideas, though it is common
for Nancy and Charlie to carry on a conversation with both talking simultaneously.

"On Nancy's seventieth birthday, there was a big party," said Warren
Buffett. "I thought about it and decided to get her a Purple Heart." Buffett
searched around in Omaha until he found an old soldier's medal in a
pawn shop.

IN THE MANGER'S HANCOCK PARK NEICIII3OIHIOOD, all the families seemed
equally prosperous. Nobody made a big splash, said Charles, Jr., "Except
Craig Hoffman's dad, who ran a candy company, which we toured."
Charles, Jr. did not even know what his father did for a living.

"I never had a sense of his career. Dad woke up and left the house between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M., and would come home between 5:30 and
6:00 RM. Dinner was at 6:30. That was our routine. What he did was mysterious to all of its. One of his offices was in a blue building. He had a big
desk. I didn't understand what was on it. I never showed a great deal of interest in what my parents did. I had no idea."

ONE REASON THE: MANGER CHILDREN were unaware of the nature of their father's work was that he seldom talked about it. And when he did, it
tended to confuse the youngsters because so much was going on at once.

Early on, Charlie mostly just practiced law at Musick, Peeler &
Garrett, using all the skills he could muster to get ahead. Chuck Huggins,
president of See's Candy but no relation to the first Nancy's family. says he saw Charlie in action as an attorney, and found him to be a "go get
'em" type of lawyer.

During an early case on which Charlie was the junior law partner, he
knew the clients would be coming in to discuss strategy on a certain day.
Charlie thought about the case and decided that there were only three
reasonable ways to resolve the issue. He thought through each approach.
The next day the clients arrived, and after some discussion, instructed the
lawyers to proceed along one of the paths that Munger had anticipated.
The senior law partner asked Charlie to go off and draft a letter accordingly. Charlie told the group that if they brought in a stenographer, he
could do the letter then and there and save the clients the trouble of returning the next day. When Munger rattled off the letter in a matter of
minutes, the clients were wowed. When they did business with the firm
after that, they asked that Munger help represent them.

Munger was especially fond of senior partner Joe Peeler, a native of
Alabama who used colorful language and like Charlie's own father, was a
great hunter and fisherman. From him Charlie learned a new word that he
liked very much-"gumption."

"No wonder I liked him," said Munger. "Also, like me, he tended to
delegate any task completely or do it all himself, and I liked his total delegation mode."

One of the firm's most interesting clients was Harvey Mudd, a
wealthy engineer with worldwide mining interests who later financed
one of the best science and engineering colleges in the country, Harvey
Mudd College, part of a cluster of small colleges in Pomona, California.
Though Munger did not have a lot of close contact with Mudd, he developed ties with Harvey's brother Seeley and one of Mudd's advisers,
Luther Anderson.

Charlie recalls that Mudd would tell his lawyers, "I don't want to
know merely what the law is and what I can accomplish without violating
the law. I welcome your help in doing rightly, all factors considered."

Charlie made some mistakes as a young lawyer, including drafting legislation granting property tax exemption to university buildings under
construction. The law passed as he wrote it, but Munger was embarrassed
to realize that it covered the buildings, but failed to mention the land under
the buildings. Another partner was able to get the situation corrected.

Nevertheless, Munger moved ahead nicely. But he also sometimes
found himself punished for his outspoken brashness and tendency to
show off his brains. His friend Chuck Rickershauser told Charlie that
when he first started out in the law, the correct path was explained to
him by a senior partner. "You must always remember that your duty is to conduct yourself so that everyone appraises you no higher than the third
smartest person in the room. The client must be made to appear smartest,
with me the next smartest, and only after this should any wisdom seem to
reside in you."

The leading partner at Musick, Peeler was Roy Garrett, and though
Munger admired Garrett's legal skills and his ability to attract important
business to the firm, he and Garrett never became as close as Munger was
to Peeler. Despite the fact that Garrett gave some of his personal legal
work to Munger for handling, Charlie said that deep down, he knew
Garrett didn't like him very well.

"Roy Garrett was a dominant personality, and he and I naturally
clashed," said Munger. "One day, fairly early in our relationship, he called
me in and chewed me out for running up $20,000 of billable time, with
no collection, on sonic small-looking account he had assigned to me. I
replied, `Roy, you have no right to talk to me this way until the first time
I fail you in billing and collection' and we left it at that. A couple of weeks
later I collected $50,000. This sort of being right got mixed reactions
from Roy."

Charlie lived by principles he'd learned at his grandfather's kneefirst, the surest way of building a business is by concentrating on the
work already on his desk, and second, by underspending his income and
amassing a pile of cash that could be invested to build future wealth.

"Munger learned a lot about business as an attorney," said Buffett.
"He was involved in an International Harvester dealership, TwentiethCentury Fox. He was always seeing reality. He is unable to be around a
problem without thinking about it."

Even things that were merely near at hand received close scrutiny, including an excellent mining property in California's Mojave Desert. "I
would like to own that boron mine-boron is an element, the mine is in
an open pit in a safe country. It has low costs and big reserves," said
Munger. "It would be a really nice mine to own, but it is already owned by
someone who knows it's a very nice mine."

Some of his clients, unfortunately, were not the types that Charlie
would have liked them to be. He began to think more about his father's
reaction when they discussed one of Al's clients, Omaha auto dealer
Grant McFayden.

"I once complained that he [Al Munger] should have more clients like
Grant McFayden and fewer like a certain other man," Charlie said. "I can
remember my father's mock horror when he explained how McFayden
treated his customers right, his suppliers right, and his employees right. A
lawyer's family would starve, my father said, if all his clients behaved like McFayden. It is a lesson I have never forgotten and it has helped my business career, even though I find, like other businessmen, that it is harder to
starve the lawyers now than it used to be. The lesson helped me prefer
McFayden types as clients and McFayden behavior as the right example
for myself."'

The problem with law, Munger felt, is that the people he most enjoyed working with didn't get in much legal trouble, and the people who
needed him most sometimes were defective characters. On top of that, in
the 1950s and 1960s, practicing law wasn't necessarily a road to wealth.

Munger gradually accumulated money from his legal practice and
began investing in securities and joining friends and clients in business
endeavors, some of which proved to he graduate-level courses in the
school of hard knocks. He'd done some legal work for a small transformer
manufacturing company in Pasadena and got along well with the clients.
Charlie hoped they would come back to him for more business. One
morning, while driving past the company offices on his way in to work,
Charlie decided that he was being too shy. He shouldn't wait for the
clients to call him. He should make a personal visit to them. He did a Uturn in the middle of the street and went back. After chatting with the
business owners for a while, he did get more work. Eventually, he took an
ownership position in the business, borrowing some of the necessary
funds. Munger's first formal partner was Ed Hoskins, who now is in his
mid-90s and lives in a golfing community near a small mid-California city.

"Ed Hoskins is a great guy. He had created Transformer Engineers. He
reached a disagreement with his venture capitalists who wanted to replace him. We worked out a deal for him to buy them out, using large
amounts of credit. It was an early leveraged buyout. It was a nonlegal
solution to what looked like a legal problem."

The company was a job shop, making highly specialized transformers
that Hoskins designed for military rockets and the like. Because the Korean War was in progress, an enormous amount of military work was underway in Southern California. Despite the opportunities presented by
the war, the business was plagued with problems. One of the key officers,
a young man, died slowly of cancer and as he did so, was carried financially by his partners.

It was obvious that the company would have to expand rapidly to pay
off the debt from the buyout. At the same time, however, competing companies spotted the wartime opportunities and also expanded rapidly.
Soon there were too many producers. The business aspects of their lives
became miserable, accounting for much of the financial pressure on Munger around the time of his divorce. The upside of the story was that
Hoskins and Munger became good friends.