In June of 1997, Michael Bloomberg was in town promoting his just released memoir, "Bloomberg by Bloomberg." We booked him on my show Greater Boston, where we began by talking about growing up in Medford. (And for the record, he claims he never pronounced it as “Mefford”).

As a very young child, he lived in Brookline and told me, “I remember asking my parents why did they move from Brookline to Medford? And my mother and father saying, ‘Well, Medford had much more diversity in terms of racial, ethnic and religious types of groups.’ Brookline was much too unified, if you will.”

Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and current Democratic presidential candidate, said that spoke to his humble roots. “My father was a bookkeeper for a dairy in Somerville ... which was owned by a company in New York that my mother worked for. And somebody fixed the two of them up. They got married and ten years later they had me.”

Bloomberg describes Medford as a humble, blue collar town and talked wistfully about his old high school, which has long since been converted into condominiums. His passion was engineering and the sciences, which took him to John Hopkins University in Baltimore for his undergraduate degree.

After graduation, it was back to Boston to attend Harvard Business School, which is where, he says, “believe it or not, that is where I lost my Boston accent, not when I was in Baltimore. I can’t quite tell you why.”

Bloomberg’s book is full of amusing anecdotes and life lessons he credits for his success. He talks of a summer job he took in Cambridge, working for a company that found temporary apartments for people doing business with local colleges.

“I got in early in the morning like 6:30-7 when most people who were in town just to rent the apartments and wanted to get back to their vacations. They looked in the newspaper, saw the ads, called up. I made the appointments. And then at 9:00 when the renters started coming in, and the full-time people came in, everybody that walks in the door asked for me and they couldn’t quite figure out why. All you gotta do is outwork the other person and you got a good shot.”

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple, not even for Michael Bloomberg. Soon after Harvard Business School, he took a job on Wall Street at the now defunct investment bank Salomon Brothers. He was working long hours and making a lot of money when he was suddenly and unceremoniously fired.

Bloomberg said that experience really hurt. “Nobody likes to be told you’re history," he said. "It’s rejection. It hurts your ego. One day I was there, the next day I was out, and I had a lot of money. And I was 39 years old.”

He could have done nothing but Bloomberg says he learned something important while working on Wall Street. He said the stock market was strictly a one-way street, that sellers had all the power because they had all the knowledge. Company and industry data was not readily available to the average buyer, so he set out to change that and Bloomberg LLP was born.

“We went out and we built a product for the buy side — for those people that didn’t have information — and we leveled the playing field.” From there, Bloomberg News was born.

He’s a man with a mission, writing in that book more than 20 years ago that, “I wake up looking forward to practicing my profession, creating something, competing against the best, having comradeship, receiving the psychic compensation that money can’t buy.”