Storybook love of George and Barbara

They met at a Christmas dance. She was 17. He was 18. Two years later they were married. The couple stayed together for 73 years, becoming the longest-married couple in presidential history.

“George Bush knows how I feel,” Barbara Bush had said. “He is the hero ... He is my hero.”

The couple’s relationship was a true love story, which granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager described Monday as “remarkable.”

George H.W. Bush, 93, has described the mother of their six children as “the mainstay, of course, the parent who was always there to help solve the daily problems and emergencies of teen and preteen life.”

In her 1994 memoir, Barbara Bush describes her and her husband as “the two luckiest people in the world.” The former president was a naval aviator in training when they met.

“I’m not much at recalling what people wear, but that particular occasion stands out in my memory,” he says in his autobiography.

The band was playing Glenn Miller tunes and he asked a friend from Rye, New York, if he knew the girl across the room in the green and red holiday dress. The friend introduced him to Barbara Pierce, a publisher’s daughter from Rye who was going to school in South Carolina. The next song was a waltz.

“Since I didn’t waltz, we sat the dance out. And several more after that, talking and getting to know each other,” George H.W. Bush said. “It was a storybook meeting.”

Within eight months, they’d met each other’s families, were engaged in August 1943 and married January 6, 1945, four months after Bush was shot down over the Pacific. He’d been the Navy’s youngest aviator when he got his wings and carried the name “Barbara” on his Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber.

“You have given me joy that few men know,” George Bush wrote to her.