The Bushes were “woven into the fabric of the town,” one resident said. “To not have them here is a void.”
He was a regular sight around the New England town he helped put on the map, whether he was skittering down the coast in his speedboat at full throttle or celebrating his 90th birthday by tumbling out of a helicopter 6,300 feet above his house.
That town, Kennebunkport, Me., lowered its flags to half-staff on Saturday to honor the death of its most famous summer resident, former President George Bush.
As the seaside town buzzed with visitors drawn to its annual Christmas festivities, local residents grappled with what the loss of Mr. Bush would mean. Flowers and other mementos were left at a spot overlooking the Bush family compound, known as Walker’s Point, where Mr. Bush spent summers throughout his life.
[ Read: George Bush’s obituary.]
“We’ve lost both of them in one year,” Tom Bradbury, the executive director of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, said of Mr. Bush and his wife, Barbara, who died in April.
“Part of the experience of coming to town would be to go by their house or look for a Bush sighting, whether he was passing by on his boat or going to a local place to eat,” Mr. Bradbury said. He added that Kennebunkport residents had become almost inured to having a front seat to history during Mr. Bush’s presidency, when Walker’s Point was known as the “summer White House” and hosted world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev.
“They were woven into the fabric of the town,” Mr. Bradbury said of the Bushes. “To not have them here is a void.
