Barbara and George H. W. Bush met at a Christmas dance: 'It was a storybook meeting'

Barbara and George H.W. Bush spent 73 years together, becoming the longest married presidential couple in U.S. history. Just months before she died at age 92, Barbara Bush said she was "still old" and "still in love" with her husband.

George Bush died on Friday at the age of 94.

Their romance started at a Christmas dance.

In 1941, George Bush, then 17, and Barbara Pierce, then 16, took notice of each other at the dance, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Per the Associated Press, Bush wrote of the meeting in his autobiography. He asked a friend if he knew her, and the pair were officially introduced.

And when a waltz started to play, the two sat it out, because he didn't know how to waltz. Instead, they had to talk and get to know one another. "It was a storybook meeting," he wrote.

Smitten already, the two started writing to each other, reuniting briefly over spring break to go on a double date to see Citizen Kane. Then, shortly after Bush enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday, they became each other's first kisses, something Pierce would describe for years to come.

For his part, Bush recalled it in a 1942 letter to his mother:

"I kissed Barbara and am glad of it. I don't believe she will ever regret it or resent it, and I certainly am not ashamed of it... If Barbara sort of forgets me, which is not unlikely, as I have no chance to see her at all, I don't believe she will ever dislike me more for having kissed her. She knows how I felt towards her and she must have shared some of the same feeling or she would not have allowed me to kiss her. I have never kissed another girl."

Less than a year later, he was deployed to fight in the war as one of the youngest naval pilots at the time. Right before he left, he and Pierce were engaged, according to the First Ladies National Library.

While Bush fought in the war — and named his planes Barbara I, Barbara II and Barbara III — Pierce enrolled in Smith College.

But her mind was never far from her fiance. Indeed, she would later describe how she was more focused on him than her studies. That especially became clear after Bush's plane was shot down in September 1944.

Their engagement was officially announced in the newspaper in December 1944. Pierce dropped out of school, and the couple was reunited on Christmas Eve that year, while Bush was on leave.

They married two weeks later, on Jan. 6, 1945.

Within months, World War II ended and Bush was discharged honorably from the Navy. The newlyweds moved to Connecticut so Bush could attend Yale — and the rest is political history.

"I married the first man I ever kissed," then-first lady Barbara Bush told TIME magazine in 1989, during the first year of George H. W. Bush's presidency. "When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up."

Barbara and George H. W. Bush met at a Christmas dance: 'It was a storybook meeting'

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