The Revolutionary

"Have you always successfully overcome being a wise guy?" I asked.

"No. I every once in a while say things that I wish I hadn't. You know, I think you have to be realistic and have fun. Everybody says that humor is something that in the end will hurt you, and if that's true, it's sad and I don't think you should go through your life that way."

Patriotism—of the merit-badge-earning, flag-waving kind—was in his blood. "My mother's most vivid recollection of World War I was that she was allowed to go farther away from home than ever before to buy flags for Armistice Day in Jersey City, because everybody had a flag," Bloomberg recalled. "It was a very patriotic time in our country." It was, but the era of Bloomberg's childhood was still one of more overt discrimination and anti-Semitism, dark reminders that there remained a gap between the American rhetoric of liberty and equality and the reality of American life. The awareness that he was seen as different, at least in some quarters, may have helped hone Bloomberg's sense of competitiveness.

When I asked him if he had encountered anti-Semitism growing up, Bloom-berg initially said no, but then recalled three different episodes. In 1947, Charlotte Bloomberg was looking for a home for her husband and two small children. They had been renting in a two-family house in Brookline, Mass., but a new owner informed them that the apartment would no longer be for rent. "Buy something's that convenient," her husband told her, meaning something close to his work in Somerville. "So I looked at a map," she says, and settled on Medford, where she found a gray house on a leafy street, halfway up a shady hill.

The transaction, however, was not a simple one. The seller had developed the neighborhood, and, in Bloomberg's recollection, did not want to be the first family on the block to sell to Jews. "And so he sold it to my father's Irish lawyer, who resold it to my father at the same table." Marjorie Bloomberg Tiven remembers the story well. "There is certainly the story of our parents' not being able to buy our house, of knowing they were not welcome in the neighborhood."

Bloomberg got into one scuffle as a child over the same kind of issue. "I vaguely remember one kid once saying something to me, and getting into a fight, but that was so long ago …"