Tell me about your parents.

My father dropped out of high school to go into World War II. He served in the Marines in the Pacific, came back, met my mother, married her not too long thereafter. She dropped out of high school to get married. We lived in northwest Baltimore, and my family was part of the schleppers, the blue-collar people, who all lived in these narrow little rowhouses. My father went to work in the post office, and spent his entire life there and retired when he was 55, and moved to Florida.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

When you’re growing up in the 1950s in a blue-collar family, you didn’t aspire to make a billion dollars the way they do today. If you went into business, you only went in from one of two ways. If you were not Jewish, you would go work for Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Standard Oil. If you were, let’s say, ethnic, to use a phrase like that, you would go into your family’s business, whatever it was. If you didn’t have a family business, you would go be a lawyer or doctor or a dentist if you were Jewish.

It was a big advantage in hindsight. Because when you grow up relatively poor — and I don’t want to make it sound like I was poverty stricken, I had parents, I wasn’t living in an orphanage — you have to learn to do things on your own and so forth.

How did the Carlyle Group come to be?

Two things happened. I read that Bill Simon had done a leveraged buyout in the early 1980s where he bought Gibson Greeting Cards and made $80 million on a $1 million investment. I didn’t know what a leveraged buyout was, but it sounded more attractive than practicing law.

And then I read an entrepreneur will start his or her first company between the age of 28 and 37. And after 37, just like a woman’s biological time clock goes down, your chance of reproducing goes down, your chance of starting a company after 37 goes down. So I said, “Oh, if I’m going to do it, I better do it now.” Then obviously, as we built the firm, the money came along, and then you have to figure out what to do with the money.