C. Fred's Story; A Dog's Life

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1984. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Format is approximately 7.25 inches by 10.5 inches. [14], 109, [5] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Frontis illustration. Illustrations. DJ has some wear, tears and soiling. C. Fred's Story bookplate on fep signed by Barbara Bush with a paw print reportedly by Fred. C. Fred's Story: A Dog's Life is a 1984 children's book by Barbara Bush recounting the adventures of her and her husband George H. W. Bush's pet spaniel, C. Fred. The book was published by Doubleday and was reprinted ten times. Writer Bob Greene described the book as "one of the major titles on the spring list of Doubleday and Company". George Bush was vice president of the United States at the time of the book's publication and the dog recounts Bush's career as he moved from Washington D.C. to China to Houston, Texas and back to Washington. Historian Katherine A.S. Sibley wrote that the book has been interpreted as a "subtle way to get to know the second family" in addition to supporting Barbara Bush's activism in advancing childhood literacy. George H. W. Bush's biographer Curt Smith wrote that the book cast Barbara Bush in a "sympathetic, down-home, dog and child loving light" and that it led to a "bond over the next third of a century between Mrs. Bush and America that was improbable, even phenomenal". Barbara Pierce Bush (June 8, 1925 - April 17, 2018) was the first lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993 as the wife of President George H. W. Bush, and the founder of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She previously was the second lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Among her six children are George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, and Jeb Bush, the 43rd governor of Florida. She and Abigail Adams are the only two women to be married to one U.S. president and the mother of another.
Barbara Pierce was born in Manhattan, New York City. She met George Herbert Walker Bush at the age of sixteen, and the two married in Rye, New York in 1945, while he was on leave during his deployment as a Naval officer in World War II. They moved to Texas in 1948, where George later began his political career. Family literacy was Barbara Bush's cause as first lady, and she called it "the most important issue we have". She became involved with many literacy organizations, served on literacy committees and chaired many reading organizations. Eventually, she helped develop the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She continued to be dedicated to eliminating the generational cycle of illiteracy in America by supporting programs where parents and their young children are able to learn together. During the early 1980s, after statistics had shown that foreign-born immigrants from Latin America had nearly quintupled just since 1960, statistics showed that 35 million adults could not read above the eighth-grade level and that 23 million were not able to read beyond a fourth-grade level. Mrs. Bush appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the situation and spoke regularly on Mrs. Bush's Story Time, a national radio program that stressed the importance of reading aloud to children. Her children Jeb Bush and Dorothy Bush Koch serve as co-chairs of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. During her lifetime Mrs. Bush remained active in the foundation and served as honorary chair.