As the nation mourns the loss of former First Lady Barbara Bush, who died in her Houston home at 92 on Tuesday, Michiganders remember the brief time she spent living in metro Detroit.
Detailed in her 1994 memoir, Bush wrote that she would sometimes travel with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, as he spent 1945 moving around the country while his squadron formed and trained
It was during one of these ventures that the pair spent time in Wyandotte and Dearborn while he was at the Grosse Ile Air Base.
In an excerpt from the publication, "Barbara Bush: A Memoir," she details her experiences learning how to do laundry, cook and clean during her time in Michigan.
"For the next eight months, we moved around the country while George’s new squadron formed and trained. Sometimes I could go with him and sometimes I couldn’t. We went to Grosse Ile Air Base in Michigan and lived in rooms in Wyandotte and Dearborn. The first room we rented was dark, and the landlady took great pleasure in my mistakes. I made many. I heard her say one day to a friend on the phone, 'You should have seen what she did today. She washed all her silk underwear and it shrank.' I did, and it did, but how mean of her not to tell me how to wash it. We moved over to Dearborn and stayed with the dearest family, Joe and Grace Gorgone and their children. We have stayed in touch all these years, until Grace died in March 1993. She taught me some of the things my mother thought I should be able to pick up by reading — things like how to cook, clothes."
Preceding her death, Bush had been struggling with congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease, and family spokesman Jim McGrath announced Sunday that she had decided to cease medical treatment and opt for comfort care.
McGrath announced her April 17 death via another statement shared on Twitter, calling her a "relentless proponent of family literacy."
Wife of 41st President George H.W. Bush and mother to 43rd President George W. Bush, she and Abigail Adams are the only two women to have been both wife to a president and mother to a president.
According to USA TODAY, a funeral service will be held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston on Saturday, a motorcade will carry her through Memorial Park and on to the George Bush Presidential Library Center in College Station, and she will be laid to rest next to the grave of her late daughter, Robin, who died at the age of 3 after battling leukemia.
Her son Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, is expected to deliver her eulogy, USA TODAY reports.
USA TODAY writers Richard Wolf and Susan Page contributed.
Contact reporter Aleanna Siacon at ASiacon@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AleannaSiacon.
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