1 41st president considered “Greenwich as home and friends.”

GREENWICH — To the world he was “Mr. President.” In later years, after his own son acquired that title, he became “41” or “H.W.”

Congressman, CIA director, envoy to China, ambassador to the United Nations.

George Herbert Walker Bush wore all of those titles in a political career of uncommon accomplishment.

Before them all, he was simply “Poppy” to family and friends in Greenwich.

Bush died Friday at the age of 94 — less than eight months after his wife, Barbara Bush.

Not exactly a native son — he was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924 — George H.W. Bush came to Greenwich as an infant. He grew up here, the second oldest of five siblings in a 1903 Victorian with a wraparound porch at 15 Grove Lane.

“I think of Greenwich as home and friends,” Bush told Greenwich Time before the 1980 New Hampshire presidential primary, won by eventual GOP nominee and running mate Ronald Reagan. “The change is amazing. I guess I remember Greenwich as more of a village ... the Pickwick Theater, the Franklin Simon store and the railroad station. When I was in high school, we used to go on the train a lot to go to hockey games.”

He was named for his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, who lived here for many years. Dorothy Bush, the president’s mother, called her father “Pop.” Her son became “Poppy.”

In Greenwich, the future leader of the free world got his first taste of government service, watching his father moderate the Representative Town Meeting.

It was here that a young boy’s brashness was sanded off, in lessons that could sting, and a Yankee humility instilled that would set him apart from Washington circles and endear him to millions of Americans.

Country Day

His parents sent the young George, by limousine, to Greenwich Country Day School, where a note from his fifth-grade teacher on his report card proved to be prophetic.

“One day, Bush will become a leader,” the teacher wrote.

“I think they thought it was a great school, and they proved to be right,” Bush said of his parents during a 2009 interview with Country Day Headmaster Adam Rohdie at Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine. “They liked what they saw, they liked the teachers. It was a great experience for us.”

It was at Country Day that the young Bush first displayed the athletic ability for which he would become known. His favorite sports were soccer, football and baseball.

Some of his earliest life lessons were learned through sports, many of which came from his coach at Country Day, Unc Hillard.

“I clipped some guy over at Rippowam, blindsided him from behind,” reads a Bush quote on the school’s website. “And I remember to this day, Unc said, ‘That was a cowardly thing you did. Never hit a guy from behind.’ ”

The patriarch of the political clan was Prescott Bush Sr., a Yale-educated investment banker who honed his leadership skills as moderator of the RTM for 17 years before going on to serve in the U.S. Senate for 11 years.

“I was a late starter in politics because we weren’t such a political family when I was growing up,” Bush wrote in his 1988 memoir, “Leaning Forward.”

The elder Bush, first elected to the Senate in 1952, became known for diplomatic talents that helped hold disparate factions of a fragmented Republican Party together, though among his noted acts was engineering Joseph McCarthy’s 1954 censure in the Senate. To this day, the state Republican Party’s highest honor is named for him.

But by many accounts, the true leader of the household was Dorothy Walker Bush, the daughter of a prominent banker who was president of the United States Golf Association — the Walker Cup is named for him.

She was active in the Red Cross in Greenwich and was co-founder of the Greenwich Shelter for Children on Arch Street, which became Family Centers.

“Mother’s criticism of her children, like Dad’s, was always constructive, never negative,” George H.W. Bush once wrote. “They were our biggest boosters, always there when we needed them. They believed in an old-fashioned way of bringing up a family — generous measures of both love and discipline.”

A sharp remark would remind the children when they were bragging. When George was 8 years old, he explained to his mother that he had lost a tennis match because he was “off his game.” “You don’t have a game,” she shot back.

But Bush described his childhood as filled with laughter, led by a mother who often was overcome by what her children termed “The Giggles.”

Older brother Prescott Bush Jr. once recalled the story of how he and George fell asleep in Christ Church on one hot Sunday, until the Rev. Alfred Wilson chose for his sermon the biblical text “Comfort me with apples.”

“Well, George and I woke up, and we looked at each other and exploded with laughter,” Prescott told Greenwich Time in 1991.

George later wrote, “Mother looked at us severely, and that quieted us, until suddenly the whole pew began to wiggle and shake, and there was Mother, attacked by ‘The Giggles.’ Of course, looking at her broke us all up, and the whole Bush family beat a fast and ignominious retreat, vanishing outside into gales of laughter.”

After Country Day, Bush attended Phillips Academy Andover and, at 18, joined the U.S. Navy, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross as a Navy pilot in World War II.

At the age of 18 or 19, he attended a Christmas dance at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich. There, he met a 16-year-old distant cousin of President Franklin Pierce who came from nearby Rye, N.Y. Her name was Barbara Pierce. They tried to waltz together, but, as the story goes, he was not much of a dancer.

Again, no matter. The marriage of George and Barbara Bush lasted 73 years, and bore six children