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told her husband that their oldest child was more than ready to leave Douglas Elementary School in Columbus and start the all-boys preparatory school of St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island:
    Prescott is quite a beaux [
sic
] and I shall be very well satisfied to have him safely under Mr. Diman’s care—the strict discipline is just the thing I agree in believing in discipline. You must be sure to arrange to go on with Prescott about the 20th as it is most necessary that you see his surroundings, meet the masters + feel satisfied about the whole.
    Flora’s reference is to the Reverend John Byron Diman, who founded St. George’s School in 1896 and recruited Samuel Bush to serve on the school’s board of trustees. She need not have worried about her husband’s reaction to the school. Any parent able to spend $850 a year on tuition would have been delighted with the spectacular 350-acre campus on majestic cliffs overlooking three beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, the St. George’s faculty numbered fifteen masters, and enrollment was limited to 125 boys.
    “I enjoyed all the advantages of that very much indeed,” Prescott recalled many years later in an oral history, describing the new world he was encountering, “with athletic fields and a beautiful gymnasium and all these things that we didn’t have in the public schools . . . For that reason I think I appreciated it more than some of the boys who came there from private schools.”
    “St. George’s was most definitely a rich boy’s school,” said John G. Doll, the school archivist. “We were very select, snobbish, and quite elitist then. Most of the boys were enrolled the day they were born, when their fathers sent telegrams to the headmaster to reserve their space. That all changed after the Depression.
    “We had a jacket-and-tie dress code during the time Prescott Bush [1908–13] and his brother, Jim [1914–18], attended, plus a heavy emphasis on religion, with chapel once a day and twice on Sunday. The boys had to walk three miles each way to attend St. Columba’s Church on Sundays. We were a big feeder into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Still are. We’re still much smaller and more exclusive than any of the other prep schools like Exeter and Andover, but now, of course, we’re coed.”
    Records at St. George’s show Prescott Bush to have been a mammoth presence. “He was really a big man on campus,” said John Doll, rattling off a stupendous record of athletics and extracurriculars, including first-squad (varsity) football, baseball, and basketball. In addition, Prescott was president of Civics Club, vice president of Red and White Council, president of Dramatic Association, leader of the Glee Club, and president of Golf Club. “He was a marvelous actor and played the lead of Sherlock Holmes in the school play,” said Doll. But the biggest honor came his senior year, when he was elected head prefect. In those days, that position, the equivalent of student-body president, carried the perquisite of a private suite of rooms that consisted of a large den with a working fireplace and a small private bedroom. So Prescott must’ve had a very happy senior year indeed.
    When Flora and Samuel received advance word that their son had been elected head prefect, they were told to say nothing until the announcement was made at school. Flora could barely contain herself. She wrote to her husband:
    I asked Prescott if there had been any elections and he said yes—baseball and he is Captain—he said Buchanan had two votes—but he had the rest. We did not speak of the other honor—the one Mr. Griswold told us of—until just as he left he said, “Mother, I won’t get that.” I did not peep—nor even
look
wise but let it go—as I presume it is better to wait—but naturally I should like to have relieved his mind.
    Prescott entered St. George’s after the sweet summer of 1908, and his graduation five years later brought him to the threshold