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of his life’s most formative experience—Yale, class of 1917.
    “For me,” he said years later, “it all began with Yale.” He credited the university with shaping his entire life. Certainly his career would have been different, for he met his future boss Walter Simmons, who hired Prescott for his first job, at a Yale reunion. His personal life would have been far different as well. Because of that job in St. Louis for the Simmons Hardware Company, he met the wealthy Yale family the Walkers and his future wife, Dorothy Walker. After a series of sales jobs, Prescott used his Yale connections to launch his career as an investment banker.
    If it’s true that, as one Yale man said, “there will always be two Yales—the Old Blues and the rest of us,” Prescott Bush was an Old Blue. He made no apology to “the rest of us” for his lifelong genuflections to Yale. The school had given him everything he valued most, and he felt no need to look beyond his college ties. As far as he was concerned, he’d met the best, so he ignored the rest.
    After graduation, Prescott regularly attended Yale class reunions and Whiffenpoof anniversaries. He visited New Haven and the tomb of Skull and Bones at least once—and sometimes as often as five times—a year. Whenever he could, he sang at the tables down at Mory’s, the clubby Yale restaurant where the Whiffenpoofs assembled to raise their glasses and sing their songs. He was an associate fellow of Calhoun College from 1944 to 1972; a Chubb Fellow in 1958; and an associate of Saybrook College. He served as a Yale trustee. He was the first chairman of Yale’s Development Board. Prescott sat on the Yale Corporation for twelve years, served as secretary of his alumni class, and was a member of the executive council. Figuratively and literally, he never left Yale.
    In writing to his class on the eve of his fiftieth reunion, he reflected on the importance of the school in his life: “I am more than ever conscious of what Yale has meant to me since 1913. Wherever I found myself in war or peace, in business or politics, in sports or social life, always the fact of Yale seemed to be there. I make this acknowledgement with a grateful heart.”
     
    Prescott walked onto the New Haven campus as a Yale “legacy” of his paternal grandfather, the Reverend James Smith Bush, class of 1844, and his maternal uncle Robert E. Sheldon Jr., class of 1904. Within four years he would create his own legacy, which would open Yale’s exclusive doors to several more generations of Bushes, including his four sons, his three grandsons, his two nephews, and, in 2001, his great-granddaughter:

    When the head prefect of St. George’s arrived for his freshman year of college, he looked like a matinee idol. At six feet four, he was the second-tallest man in his class, and one of the handsomest. His hair was as dark as sealskin and parted down the middle to show what Grandmother Harriet Bush called his “noble forehead.” He was a good student and majored in history, but he truly excelled in sports, particularly as a first baseman on Yale’s baseball team. So important were sports in the lives of Yale men then that “Not Winning a ‘Y’” was listed as one of the “Biggest Regrets of College” by the class of 1917. Prescott had won his baseball letter by his junior year. He went out for the golf team and even became a football cheerleader, all of which combined to make him one of the most admired men on campus.
    “There was a sort of mystique in the old days of people who were good in sports,” said Stuart Symington Jr. (Yale 1950), son of the late senator from Missouri. “My father was a superior athlete. So was Pres Bush. They were the lords of creation . . . In that era, excellence in sports was highly prized. You’d see banner headlines in
The New York Times
that Yale beat Harvard or Princeton. It mattered greatly then. In that country-club world—small, social, and cohesive—a sport played