In a break during a tense 2009 Citigroup board meeting, one of Wall Street’s more influential figures Robert Rubin approached the firm’s outside investment banking adviser, Scott Bok.

Former US Treasury secretary Rubin, at that time a Citi executive, told Bok he knew his father, mistakenly presuming he was the son of Derek Bok, the esteemed scholar and former president of Harvard University. The origins of the banker’s father were far more humble — a Midwestern high school dropout, he supported his family by installing telephone poles. This start, however, did not hinder an eventful four-decade career on Wall Street recounted in Scott Bok’s memoirs Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy and Timing set to published next week.

Over that run, he raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in stock and pay (he also bought Greenhill shares at times), eventually accumulating enough stature to become the chair of trustees of an Ivy League university as well as Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History.