When George Herbert Walker Bush was a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1941, he noticed Barbara « Babs » Pierce at a dance.
« George Bush sees her and asks a friend to introduce them, » said Warren Finch, director of the George H. W. Bush Library and Museum. « So they start to dance and a waltz comes on, and George says, ‘I don’t know how to waltz. Can we sit down and talk?' »
Less than two years later, before Bush went off to war as a pilot in the U. S. Navy, he and Pierce got engaged.
« If you read some of those letters that President Bush wrote, when he was that fighter pilot, and those letters were sent back to his mother saying, ‘I love Barbara.