Bush returns to Texas a final time

Former president’s adopted state to bid its own farewell

HOUSTON — Seventy years after George H.W. Bush arrived in west Texas in a red Studebaker, determined to forge his own path in the roughand-tumble oil industry and move beyond his patrician East Coast roots, he returned to his adopted home state Wednesday for the last time.

After a somber service at Washington National Cathedral, the casket carrying the body of the 41st president of the United States was flown to Houston on the presidential aircraft. As the sun set on a chilly Houston evening, hundreds waited in line to say a last goodbye to the president as he lay “in repose” overnight at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, where he and his late wife Barbara worshipped for a half century.

“He was a great man from the Greatest Generation and he served his country well,” said Julie Rooksberry, 43, an Austin, Texas, resident who brought her three children to pay respect to Bush and teach them about a more civil time in American history. “All they’ve known is animosity and back-andforth in politics,” she said.

Bush, who died Friday at age 94, had lived in relative quiet with Barbara in Houston’s leafy Tanglewood community since leaving office in 1993, defeated in his quest for a second term by the upstart Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton.

Bush and Barbara Bush, who died in April at age 92, have been fixtures in their adopted hometown, raising funds for literacy and cancer research, dining without fanfare in stripmall restaurants, and rooting from behind home plate for their beloved baseball teams, occasionally smooching for the “Kiss Cam.” Just a few weeks before his death, Bush was strong enough to venture out for a bowl of his favorite oyster stew with his friend and former secretary of state James Baker.

“They were Houston’s first family,” said David Jones, chief executive of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation. “They loved Houston and Houston loved them back. People embraced them wherever they went.”

Though Bush was born in Massachusetts and spent summers on the family compound in Maine, most in the Lone Star State consider the Bushes their own.

There was a palpable sense of grief in Houston on Wednesday, its streets quiet for the national day of mourning, flags at halfstaff, a sense that a golden era had come to a close.

“To me, to regular people, he was always one of us,” said Judy Pierce, 69, of Houston, who on Wednesday placed a wreath at a memorial statue built for Bush in the city’s downtown. Mourners left colorful socks to honor the president’s penchant for flashy footwear. “You would see him out and he would always talk to you. He did a lot of good things. Some things didn’t turn out the way he wanted to, but that happens to all presidents. And he never did put on airs, you know?”

When Bush arrived in the west Texas town of Odessa in 1948, he was a decorated World War II Navy aviator who had just graduated from Yale University. He had married his high school sweetheart and the couple had a young son when they ventured west to a flat landscape of oil derricks and what Barbara Bush recalled as a hot new world away from the wide porches and manicured lawns of their privileged youth. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, was an investment banker who would go on to serve two terms in the Senate from Connecticut.

To Bush, Texas seemed a place of limitless opportunity.

“He was raised in New England, so he never quite shed some of his New England reserve,” said Charles Foster, an immigration attorney in Houston who was a friend and supporter of Bush. “He was a good old boy in a way his father couldn’t be. He liked the can-do spirit of Texas, its quasi-frontier attitude, the feeling that anything is possible, you can come down here and start all over again.”

As Bush learned the ropes of the oil business - eventually starting his own independent oil company with a stake from his family - Barbara stayed at home raising little “Georgie” and daughter Pauline Robinson, known as Robin, who died at age 3 in 1953 of leukemia. The still grieving family moved to Houston in 1959, and the clan grew, with Jeb, Neil, Marvin and finally Dorothy, known as Doro.

Politics beckoned; Texas at the time was beginning to turn red after decades of Democratic blue. Bush was elected first the chairman of the Harris County Republicans, and then to two terms in the U.S. House. Bush was often spotted in Houston’s Memorial Park, jogging and pressing the flesh.

After a second failed bid for the U.S. Senate, Bush went on to a series of highprofile jobs - ambassador, China envoy, CIA director, vice president - and his visits to Texas became less frequent. The family continued to vacation each summer at their compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Once elected president, Bush helped showcase Houston as a city coming into its own and growing increasingly cosmopolitan.