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Posted on Sun, May. 08, 2005

Sister takes trip to Buffett line

Search for genealogical link between singer Jimmy and financier Warren spans 20 years
By Ethan Smith
Wall Street Journal

Even Jimmy Buffett’s most ardent devotees – the margarita-sipping superfans who call themselves Parrot Heads – might not have heard one 2003 composition by the troubadour of laid-back island living.

“I bought Berkshire way back when it was cheap,” he sang in the ditty, strumming softly on an acoustic guitar. “I bought Berkshire way back then, and I do nothing but keep ... it.”

A two-line ode to the stock of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which currently trades at more than $84,000 a share, might seem out of character for the singer of “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Jimmy Buffett is indeed a longtime Berkshire shareholder, and his short composition was played on videotape at Berkshire’s annual meetings in 2003 and 2004.

In fact, the singer also has been friends with Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s 74-year-old chairman and chief executive, for more than 20 years, both men say. They don’t see each other often, but they regularly talk on the phone about business. They have even performed music together. And they plan to collaborate again at a New York charity dinner for Conservation International Tuesday night.

Besides sharing a surname, the two men have long suspected that they also share a common genetic history. “Warren leaves messages for ‘Cousin Jimmy’ and always has,” says the singing Buffett, 58. “I’ll take it from him.” The singer calls the financier “Uncle Warren.”

No one knows for sure. The two are only now coming to the end of a two-decade process of determining how or whether they are actually related.

The attempt to link the two strains of Buffettmania has been spearheaded for more than 20 years by Doris Buffett, Warren’s 77-year-old sister.

“I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to connect up the two families,” says Doris Buffett, who heads a charity for battered women called the Sunshine Lady Foundation Inc. Despite years of research, she has been unable to establish a conclusive link. She says she is considering DNA testing.

Jimmy Buffett, Warren Buffett and Doris Buffett act more or less as though they were long-lost relatives. Doris Buffett has been a guest of the singer at performances. Her brother says he has never been to a Jimmy Buffett concert, but he has seen one on television.

Warren Buffett last May played ukulele and sang “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue (Has Anybody Seen My Gal?)” at the opening of Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant in Omaha, Neb., where Warren Buffett has lived most of his life.

Jimmy Buffett says he chose Omaha as a location for his restaurant – one of 14 in the chain – because it is a midsize city, but also because of Uncle Warren.

“He’s such a cheeseburger freak,” Jimmy Buffett says. “He said, ‘If you put one in Omaha, I’ll buy the first cheeseburger.’ ” Warren Buffett says he is still a regular customer.

The friendship between the two Buffetts dates back to the early 1980s, when Doris Buffett sent letters to 116 other Buffetts around the United States seeking information about her family’s history.

One of the letters landed on the desk of Jimmy Buffett, where it sat, unanswered, for two years before Doris Buffett finally heard back from the singer’s office. Then, the two began corresponding, and in 1983 arranged to travel together, along with the singer’s parents, daughter, nanny and others, to Norfolk Island – a remote speck of land in the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, where there happens to be a large population of Buffetts.

Not long after they got back from the South Pacific, Doris Buffett introduced the singer to her brother at a lunch in Washington. It was that meeting that inspired Jimmy Buffett to buy 15 shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock in 1989, he says, adding that he has been buying it regularly ever since. How much does he own? “A lot,” he says with a laugh. The share price has risen by about $75,000, or more than 800 percent, since the year he first bought it.

So far, Doris Buffett has traced her family’s roots to the late 17th century on Long Island, where a John Buffett was married in the town of Huntington, in 1696. Meanwhile, she says, the furthest she has gotten with Jimmy Buffett’s family is the town of Rose Blanche, on the southern shore of Newfoundland.

“Trying to relate the two families has been a little more problematic,” she says, owing to hazy recollections, wishful thinking and murky records. “There are plenty of miscellaneous Buffetts.”

The strongest evidence she has providing a link between the families is a photograph of a family of Canadian Buffetts who trace their ancestry back to the same part of Canada as Jimmy Buffett does. One of the men in the picture, Doris Buffett says, bears a striking resemblance to her father, Howard H. Buffett, the late Republican Nebraska congressman of the 1940s and ’50s. Still, there is no documentary evidence that the person in the photo is related to either Warren Buffett or Jimmy Buffett.

-- posted by Kirk