The Hill School alum Lewis Lehrman, who helped turn his family’s wholesale grocery business into Rite Aid, shares the story of his success in his new memoir, The Sum of It All, writes John Steele Gordon for The Wall Street Journal.

85-year-old Lehrman was born in Harrisburg and received an excellent education at the Hill School, Yale, and Harvard. This foundation helped him create the third-largest drugstore chain in the country.

“We didn’t invent the discount health and beauty business, but we took an idea, and with more determination, energy, and system made it into a very large enterprise,” he wrote in the book.

Coming from a modestly prosperous family, Lehrman made himself by his thirties.

He gave politics a try when he ran for governor of New York and won the 1982 Republican nomination easily.

He became a major player on Wall Street in the late 1980s, first as a managing director at Morgan Stanley and then of his own hedge fund, Ten Squared.

In addition to his life story, the memoir offers his main rules for investing and his thoughts on the economy in general.

Read more about Lewis Lehrman’s memoir in The Wall Street Journal.