Heartbreaking Stories of Loss: Charlie Munger's Early Life Exposed | Final Interview with CNBC 2023 【C:C.M 325】

[Transcript]

BECKY QUICK: You saw your family getting clobbered on all sides during the Depression.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes.

BECKY QUICK: How did that —

CHARLIE MUNGER: One was an architect.

BECKY QUICK: But how did that —

CHARLIE MUNGER: One was a builder who was broke. He had loans he wasn't even paying off from the '20s boom — bubble — when he was a builder. And he made himself an appraiser. Finally, he became one of the best appraisers and made a good living too. But he had terrible years in the early '30s and had a terrible medical problem as one of his children died very slowly of meningitis. It cost a lot of money, and he just couldn't pay it. He had not paid off that fully until the war came.

BECKY QUICK: So what did that —

CHARLIE MUNGER: He finally paid it off and got quite prosperous in the post-war boom, but he had a long period of being utterly without money. So what he did, he moved into an extra house that my grandmother, grandfather Russell owned. And at least he didn't have to pay rent.

BECKY QUICK: What did all these impressions mean for you? I mean, these are formative years for you as you're watching this?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, this is quite serious. A little boy of his cousin, who's the same age, is dying next door and it takes forever and costs a fortune. There's no money to pay the doctors, the hospitals, anything. That's a serious growing-up experience.

On the other side of me lived Madeline Duffy, my great female playmate. Madeline and I were just inseparable living side by side. Madeline Duffy and I were playing with this little dog that was a stranger to us. We were very young, but I can remember her and the dog, so I must have been nearly four years old. That dog was inches away from my cheek, but it bit her cheek instead of mine. They didn't get to her treatment in time. They got to it, but it was too late, and she died after terrible trauma. She was a very outstanding little girl who might have grown up to be a Becky Quick if the world had been different, but she never grew up.

So I'm sitting there with two dead children. People don't realize how high the death rate was among children until about the middle of the century that preceded the one in which I was born. In those days, if you wanted three children, you had six, and you shoveled three into the graveyard before they even grew up. That was the system. That was mankind's system.

BECKY QUICK: That's an awful system.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It was an awful system. The agony of doing that was just, you see the agony with somebody like Lincoln, who loved his children so much and did not have a really functioning wife. For a man who has no functioning wife, to have his children die one by one. He lost three out of his four sons. They never grew up.

Source: https://youtu.be/H5Oom5Rjp_Y?si=ZEkkZkAN6WyOWcl9

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