B000U5KFIC EBOK (12 page)

Nancy was youthful, healthy, and had energy. A skilled athlete, she
played tennis and kept skiing well past the age of 60, and despite recent
hip replacement surgery, still plays golf.

"She's a great self-investor," said Molly. "What you learn from Nancy
is never give up on yourself. Just keep working on your stuff. She does
very beautiful watercolor painting, which she began in her 50s. She
cooks French food at a gourmet level."

Charlie and his second wife Nancy at their wedding reception.

NANCY HAD A CALIFORNIA-STYLE PEDIGREE not unlike the one Charlie brought
with him from Omaha. Her father's family moved from Beaumont, Texas,
to Los Angeles in 1902 and were real estate developers before the Great
Depression diminished the family fortune. David Barry Jr., Nancy's father, was in the insurance business and was also involved in various real
estate ventures. Among other things he was interested in botany and built
greenhouses where he crossbred rare plants, particularly palms and
bromeliads. Her mother, a native Californian, was a teacher.

Nancy's parents met at the most characteristically Californian of all
colleges, Stanford University in Palo Alto. Stanford was founded in 1918
by Leland Stanford, a railroad baron who dedicated the college to his
son who succumbed to typhoid fever while still a teenager. When their
son died Stanford told his wife that the children of California now would
be their children, and soon afterward the couple established the West's
most distinguished university.

"I was born in Los Angeles at the hospital where Charlie is chairman of the board, Good Samaritan," said Nancy Munger. "I lived in Los Angeles, and went to public school until the tenth grade, then I attended Marlborough School."

Nancy's mother was an only child but she henefitted from an extended family. The Wittenbrocks, her mother's grandparents, had settled
in Sacramento around the time of the Gold Rush and prospered there.

Her grandmother had an uncle and six aunts, noted Barry Munger.
"Each was given a house when they got married on a single block in Sacramento. When she visited as a child, Mother could run around from one
house to another. The aunts' houses are still there on J Street, close to
the state capitol. The original Wittenbrock home is listed as a historic
landmark."

"The aunts," said Nancy, "were endlessly patient with checkers, tiddlywinks, and jackstraws. Each afternoon they chose someone's garden
to gather in and gossip. They had fruit trees. They canned peaches and
cherries."

Like her parents before her, Nancy also went off to Stanford. Five of
the eight Munger children followed suit, and if Wendy's daughter Anna is
accepted in 2000, she will make the fourth generation of her family to attend Stanford.

"I majored in economics," said Nancy. "I loved business law, but I
didn't receive any encouragement to go to law school. Instead, I married
and had a family shortly after graduating."

Following graduation Nancy's husband continued at Stanford Law
School. Nancy took a job at a scientific laboratory at Moffett Field in
nearby Mountain View. She worked in a section where wind tunnel and
other research work was conducted for early supersonic aircraft.

"They asked me, would you rather be in the typing pool or use a calculator.' I said calculator. We used a Frieden machine, and I calculated
the shapes of aircraft wings and fuselages," recalled Nancy.

It was Nancy's plan to earn a master's degree in American history,
but before she could complete her studies the couple returned to
Los Angeles.

NANCY BORTHWICK HAI) BEEN DIVORCED for it short time and was living with
her two young sons in a house in a canyon above old Bel Air. She and
Charlie met on a blind date.

"Good friends lived up the street. They knew some friends of
Charlie's, who said he'd like to meet someone, so they arranged for us to
meet," said Nancy. The couple who did the introducing were Martha and
Roy Tolles. Martha is it writer of children's stories and Roy was one of Charlie's law partners at Wright & Garrett." Friends say that after Charlie
and Nancy had their first evening out, Tolles asked how it went. Charlie
assured him that everything went very well, but then scolded Tolles for
not telling Charlie the most important thing about Nancy-that she had
been a Phi Beta Kappa student.

"My mother and Charlie are both very bright, capable people and neither of them suffer fools particularly gladly or wants to waste time," explained Nancy's eldest son Hal Borthwick. "And I think that both having
been married and both having relatively unfortunate divorces in terms of
what was involved ... in terms of emotional intensities and what not ...
I think they made a fairly quick decision as to whether the other person
was worth a second look."

It is clear the prospects struck them both as promising.

"No one would write a novel this way. No one would ever name both
wives Nancy," exclaimed Charles, Jr.

Hal Borthwick was about seven years old when his mother remarried
and Charlie moved into her house on Roscomare Road not far from the
north side of the University of California, Los Angeles campus. "It was
just me and my younger brother, David. Teddy had died before they were
married and the girls lived with their mother in Pasadena."

The Mungers were married and nine and a half to ten months later,
Charles, Jr. was born. It became a his, hers, and ours establishmentCharlie's two girls from his previous marriage, Nancy's two boys and
Charles, Jr. Roughly every three years after that a new baby arrived and together Charlie and Nancy had three sons and a daughter.

"Apparently I was a happy baby, fat little boy, always laughing," said
Charles, Jr. His parents have told him, "We needed a son like you just then."

By the time Charles, Jr. came along, both families were settling into
their new arrangements. The two older sisters had a fairly tame existence.
Hal and David's father was no longer in the picture. He stuck around for a
while after the divorce, but not long, said Hal. "He went back over to
Honolulu where the family had a mortuary and other business interests
and he was there for a while and then he moved to the Philippines and he
was there for many years. He had various business interests, including
some memorial parks and stuff like that."

It was many years before Hal and David Borthwick's natural father returned to the United States, and by that time the young men were well
assimilated into the Munger clan. For Hal, the integration started quickly
but did not go smoothly.

"I know that I had felt myself to be somewhat the man of the house,
even as young as I was," said Hal. "Charlie would take Mother out for a date and I'd be up waiting for Mother when she came home, whether I
was supposed to be in bed or not."

Hal's feelings intensified once there was another man in the house.
"My personality is one of wanting to acquire whatever amount of territory I can expand into," admitted Borthwick. "And so I had acquired territory that I was going to be deposed from and it happened. It was as
simple as that. Behavioral issues-I used to pound on my younger brother
a lot and Charlie made short work of all that. It isn't easy to go through a
divorce, to lose your dad. I was old enough so I remember the things
that kids can remember about divorces. Fighting and stuff like that. My
brother David was too young, so he doesn't have the same experience set
that I do. But I still had damage from that."

Borthwick said his new stepfather was not afraid to spank, though
Charlie had to be pushed before he would do so, and the spankings were
not severe. Borthwick said lie was the type of child who needed discipline and benefitted from it. "My brother David on the other hand was not
that kind of child. I'm not aware of any of the other children that got paddled as much as I did. I'm sure Charlie didn't particularly enjoy it, but at
the end of the day it got the job done."

The territorial issues took several years to resolve since Borthwick
was a particularly pugnacious boy, and during that time, Hal felt angry.

"I gave those concessions up grudgingly, but ultimately I came to accept Charlie as my father in every sense of the word other than biological," said Borthwick. "Because what I am today, you know, he has
contributed to materially. The way I approach life, my value structure,
and what I will and won't do."

In the meantime, the brothers and sisters just kept arriving.

"There are 20 years between the oldest and youngest," explained
Charles, Jr. "Molly and Hal are together, David and Wendy. Now the age
differences matter less. But most of the time the family was a fuzzy
muddle."

Carol Estabrook says that the commotion at home suited her brother
perfectly. "I think he would have had 40 children. It was not from a
lonely childhood. He was always gregarious, friendly. He had lots of
friends."

Perhaps it was the example of the big, relaxed family gatherings at
his great grandfather's house in Iowa; maybe lie was inspired by the memory of the gang of children at Star Island in the summer.

"I didn't see life as a breeder's derby," said Charlie. However, he
added, "I'm very glad to have had children. I don't want to crow that they
are superstars-hut we're pleased with them all."

Regardless of his motivation for having them, the upbringing of eight
children was a daunting financial task. The family went to Star Island in
the summer partly because it was an inexpensive vacation for such a big
crowd. The pressure on Nancy was tremendous, but she recognized the
need to build both family and financial stability.

"The early clays were the scraping by clays," noted Charles, Jr. "Trying
to reestablish themselves after their lives had hit the rocks. She backs the
plan, she was faced with a number of children for so long. Mother's
mother or Marv Rhodes-Mom's childhood nurse-looked after us sometimes. My Grandfather Barry had built a house on Diamond Head Road in
Honolulu, and our parents went there. At the end of a week's vacation, at
the thought of going back, my mother burst into tears. The work at home
was overwhelming."

Nancy's reaction was not surprising considering her many duties,
but it seemed out of character.

"Mother is emotionally stable," said Barry Munger. "She does not
suffer from much self-doubt, self-criticism. She's very loyal. Family is a
sacrament."

Charlie wasn't the sort of man who came home and helped with the
laundry in the evenings, and Nancy didn't expect that of him.

"I think my mother gave him an incredible amount of latitude to concentrate on his affairs and career," said Emilie Munger. "She did everything in the home. I expect my husband to help with the boys and go on
family outings on the weekends."

The view a Munger child has of Charlie's presence in the home varies
somewhat, depending on whether a younger or an older child is asked. To
the older children, Charlie seemed always to be working. The younger
children came along when he was more firmly established, and to them
lie seemed less busy.

"I'm not trying to paint an idea of a desert, devoid of all interaction
between father and son," said Hal Borthwick, "there were family trips, we
would fish back in Minnesota, and things like that, but, he was a very,
very, busy man in those years."

Nevertheless, recalled one of the younger children, Barry, "He was always there. He was not the type of father who took off on ski trips or on
business trips. He was always principally there, but he had an active business and social life, a lot of preoccupation."

To Emilie Munger, third from the youngest, "My father seemed like a
traditional father. Everyone's dad was going to the office, coming back
to dinner. We all sat down together for dinner. I didn't have the feeling that he was gone a lot. He played golf on Saturday, was around Sunday
morning. He wasn't that involved in day-to-day discipline, but was a
strong figure, so you knew if you ever broke a cardinal rule you would be
in trouble."

Barry described his father as "high energy," out the door early in the
morning and back in the door for dinner. He brought projects home and
turned his attention to those after the evening meal. "He could go for a
long time on nervous energy, on family flights, family trips. He would get
on a 6:00 A.M. flight. My mother does not function early. She gets up early,
but would rather not rush out the door."

Charlie habitually did several things at once. He would sit in a chair
in the evening and read a book, at the same time following and interjecting comments into the family conversation.

"Both parents are stiff-upper-lip types. They are a team," said Barry.
"You would never play one parent off another. You would never have had
success. Their basic feelings about raising children, what they're allowed
to do, not do, are similar. When we were young, a lot of attention was
paid just to keep us from tearing up the car. He was strict, but not the
Great Santini. You wouldn't lip off to him. They weren't the type of people you'd do that to. In the height of adolescence-I would mouth off, be
sulky. I had the closest thing to a classic adolescence of the younger children. But I would say in terms of my peers, I was mild. I didn't run away
from home. We weren't hell-raisers."