Crain and Sons Funeral Home

Choosing marriage over a college degree or a career, she embarked on a course that would take her to the United Nations and China, the vice president's residence in Washington, D.C., during Ronald Reagan's two terms as president, and the White House as first lady from 1989 to 1993. She would see two sons become governors — George and Jeb — and one of them follow his father's footsteps to the U.S. presidency.Bush learned to laugh easily at her own unglamorous profile, the white hair that she refused to dye becoming the emblem of her old-school tastes. She said her last effort to color it was in 1970, when a rinse called "Fabulous Fawn" ended up dripping down her neck during a hot day on the campaign trail. After that, "I decided to let nature take its course."Just as her husband represented the last of a breed — the World War II veteran as president — Barbara Bush exemplified a type of first lady who went out of style when she departed the political scene. Though she never expressed second thoughts about her chosen path — she'd dropped out of Smith College to get married and start a family — others sometimes did.In 1990, 150 students at Wellesley College rebelled at news that Bush had been enlisted to deliver the commencement address. "Wellesley teaches that we will be rewarded on the basis of our own merit, not on that of a spouse," the students said in a petition.Bush went through with the speech, which included the line: "At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent."As Bush was finishing her memoir in 1994, she was watching her successor, Hillary Clinton, carve a new path for the first lady by heading up her husband's attempt to implement a universal health-care system."I am not too sure that the American public likes the spouse to be too front-and-center," Bush wrote. "She seems much the stronger of the two. Does it make him seem weaker?"She largely blamed the media fo... (Crain's Detroit Business)