Samuel Prescott Bush, Class of 1884: Political Patriarch, Prepared by Stevens

Samuel Prescott Bush (1863-1948), patriarch of what would become the Bush political family, was a Stevens Institute of Technology football player, tennis player and mechanical engineering graduate who would go on to become one of the leading industrialists of his time.

Graduating from Stevens in 1884, he then built a successful career as a railroad executive and then as president of Buckeye Steel Castings Company, having taken the reins of the company from Frank Rockefeller (brother of John D. Rockefeller). During his career, Bush served as the president of the Ohio Manufacturing Association, sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and was appointed to President Herbert Hoover's President's Committee for Unemployment Relief.

Bush would also, of course, begin a long political legacy. His first son (of five children) was the banker and influential U.S. Senator Prescott Bush. He was the grandfather of the nation’s 41st president, George H.W. Bush, and great-grandfather to the nation’s 43rd president, George W. Bush.