Barbara Bush, Presidential Wife and Mother, and Rye Native, is Dead.
May she rest in peace.
Links to coverage below. See our story on Barbara Bush from earlier in the week.
(PHOTO: A Presidential tweet from March with Barbara and George.)
Barbara Bush's passing:
The New York Times story.
The New York Post story.
The CNN story.
The Washington Post story.
The Houston Chronicle story.
From the NYT with some added local context:
“She attended the public Milton School (*Hewlett Street*) and the private Rye Country Day School (*then along Grandview Avenue*)…She met George Bush in 1941 at a Christmas dance at the (*then elite and restricted*) Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich, Conn…After enrolling at Smith College but before entering the freshman class, she shocked her mother by spending the summer working in a nuts-and-bolts factory (*likely Russell, Burdsall & Ward Bolt & Nut Company who’s vast plant stretched along western Midland Avenue in Port Chester from today’s Home Depot site a full half-mile to Slater Street*)
….She and Mr. Bush, on leave from the Navy, married in Rye (*at Rye Presbyterian Church*) on Jan. 6, 1945(* Reception photos are apparently Manursing Island Club?*); the bride, not yet 20, had dropped out of Smith at the beginning of her sophomore year….”
Much more will be found in the bound editions of The Rye Chronicle at Rye Library in their late 1944 and early 1945 editions. If you have the time it’s refreshingly worth seeing the balanced journalism The Chronicle produced for decades under Publisher Richard Archer.
The wedding reception for the Bushes was held at the Apawamis Club, just a stone’s throw from where Barbara Bush grew up on Onondaga Street.