President George HW Bush has died - here's what you might not know about him

President George HW Bush has died at the age of 94.

The 41st US President died just after 10pm on Friday, November 30 – about eight months after the death of his wife Barbara, a family spokesman said.

Elected in 1988, he served a single term before losing his 1992 re-election bid to Democrat Bill Clinton.

George HW Bush was largely known for his work in public office from congressman and CIA director up to vice President and President.

But the World War II hero and great-grandfather was also an avid skydiver, played in the first-ever College World Series and was the longest-married president in US history.

Here are some things you might not know about the George HW Bush…

Nicknames

George HW Bush was known to his family as “Poppy”. According to his wife, he was named after his maternal grandfather, who was known as “Pops”, so was given the moniker “Little Pops”.

That nickname evolved into Poppy, which Bush apparently “hated as he got older, but it was hard to break such a long-standing habit,” Barbara Bush wrote in her memoir.

But “Gampy” – his grandchildren’s nickname for him – was something he embraced.

Meeting his wife

George HW Bush and wife Barbara were the longest married presidential couple.

They were married on January 6, 1945 and she died on April 17, 2018.

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The couple met at a dance in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1941. He was a 17-year-old high school senior. She was 16 and home for Christmas from school in Charleston, South Carolina.

The band was playing Glenn Miller tunes, but when he asked her to dance, the music changed to a waltz. Apparently he didn’t know how to waltz, so they talked instead.

The sea

Mr Bush’s grandfather taught him how to handle and dock a boat in Maine, sparking a lifelong love of the sea and boats.

At the age of nine, he and his 11-year-old brother were first allowed to take out their grandfather’s lobster boat by themselves.

Mr Bush wrote in a 1987 book that he loved “the physical sensation of steering a powerful machine, throttle open”.

The air

During the Second World War, Mr Bush was one of the Navy’s youngest pilots when he was shot down during a 1944 bombing mission.

He parachuted into the Pacific Ocean and was rescued by an American submarine.

In 1997 he fulfilled a wartime promise to himself to skydive one day just for fun, when at age 73 and over his family’s objections, he bailed out over a military base in Arizona, “to show that old guys can still do stuff,” he said.

He later marked his 75th, 80th, 85th and 90th birthdays with parachute jumps.

Baseball

As a first baseman and captain of his baseball team at Yale University, Mr Bush played in the first-ever College World Series in 1947.

His team lost to the University of California. Yale again reached the College World Series finals in 1948 and this time lost to Southern California.

Gulf War

The signature event of Mr Bush’s presidency was the 1991 Gulf War.

In 2011, on the 20th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, he said that when he ordered US troops to Kuwait, he “feared it would go badly”.

“But it went far more clean … far more quickly, far less loss of our lives and Iraqi lives, than we worried about. It was very rewarding.”

Letter to the editor

Mr Bush said he sent one letter-to-the-editor as president, writing to the New York Times about a story that branded him out of touch because he didn’t know about grocery store price-scanning devices.

“I was – I thought – smeared by an ugly story,” he said in a 1999 C-SPAN interview.

He said his remark describing the device as “amazing” came at a convention showing off the new technology and was portrayed by “some lazy little reporter … (who) wasn’t even there… And the damn story lived on.”

Final resting place

After suffering an irregular heartbeat in 2000, he told reporters as he was released from a Florida hospital that mortality was something he thought about “but not with fear. If you’ve got faith, you don’t think of it with fear”.

His burial site, behind his presidential museum in College Station, Texas, is near a pond and across a footbridge over a creek where three large post oaks form a semicircle.

“The loveliest resting spot I have ever seen,” Barbara Bush once described it. Their daughter, Robin, who died of leukaemia at the age of three in 1953, was moved to the site in 2000, and Mrs Bush was buried there in April.