Forty years ago this June, Warren Buffett bought a uniform maker he'd never heard of, in a city he never visited, on the strength of a letter from a stranger. Fechheimer Brothers is the purest specimen of the Buffett acquisition method — and, at Berkshire's current $727 billion scale, a deal the company can no longer bring itself to do. We trace Fechheimer's 40-year slide from a named earnings line into corporate silence using two primary-sourced charts, then show why Greg Abel's first letter as CEO — lamenting that a rodent-control business "had been ten times bigger" — proves the method survives even as its original scale became impossible.