Newsweek published this story under the headline of “Omaha's Plain Dealer” on April 1, 1985. Because Warren Buffett's recent business acquisition battles made headlines, Newsweek is republishing the story.

In his best-selling book Supermoney, author Adam Smith offered this admiring portrait of Warren Buffett: "While the gunslingers of the Sixties were promoting each other over drinks at Oscar's, then going back to their office so they could watch the tape, Buffett was compiling the best records in the industry from Omaha, Nebraska. No quote machines, no ticker, no Oscar's, no chewed fingernails, no tranquilizers, no Gelusil, no backgammon after the close, no really big spectacular winners . . . [just] quiet, simple stocks, easy to understand, with a lot of time left over for the kids, for handball, for listening to the tall corn grow."

At 54, Warren Buffett is still in Omaha, still listening to the tall corn grow—and still dazzling his envious colleagues on Wall Street with his perspicacity in the marketplace. Last week he made one of the boldest plays of a 34-year career that has seen a lot of them: his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a holding company with stakes in everything from insurance to newspapers, put up $517.5 million of the $3.5 billion Capital Cities Communications will spend to take over ABC.Aside from its size, perhaps the most untypical thing about the deal was the high visibility it gave Warren Buffett, who much prefers a low profile. "It's not a plus to get terribly well known," he told a visiting reporter last week, waving an arm at his spare, six-person set of offices. "As you can see, we're not equipped to handle tons of inquiries. We get letters from people all over who want advice on investments. I don't like to be hard-nosed, but there's also no way I can do it and get my job done."

When one looks at his track record, it's easy to understand why investors pester Buffett. A student and disciple of the late Benjamin Graham, a Columbia University professor once called the Maimonides of portfolio management, Buffett set up his first investment partnership in 1956 at the age of 25. When he dissolved the firm in 1969, an investor who had risked $10,000 in 1956 would have collected $300,000. In 1969 Buffett emerged from the final distribution of his partnership with control of Berkshire Hathaway, a New England textile firm industrial internet of things . Since then he has built Berkshire Hathaway into a more than $2 billion conglomerate that owns, among other things, 13 percent Embedded LTE Cat 1 router of The Washington Post Company, 36 percent of GEICO, a major property and casualty insurer, and smaller pieces of such disparate properties as Time Inc. and Exxon Corp. (chart).