By Suzanne Hodgson
Staff Writer

Laura Welch said she first met her boyfriends’ parents six weeks after meeting him and was introduced to them with a big announcement
“I was introduced to the senior Bushes with the news we were getting married,” she said.
Now known as Laura Bush, the former first lady spent a very personal hour entertaining a crowd at the Nonantum Resort with tales of her life – her first introduction to the senior Bushes and family jokes, including capers at the White House – as she read excerpts from her New York Times best-selling memoirs “Spoken from the Heart.”
The 464-page book, published by Simon & Schuster, was released May 4. Laura Bush soon went on a month-long book tour, zigzagging across the country.
Kennebunkport had to wait two months for its stop until the Bushes, both Laura Bush and George W., traveled to Maine for their annual visit to Walker’s Point.
The wait was worth it for more than 200 people who got a chance to hear Laura Bush speak and to see former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, who sat in the front row and happily took gentle chiding from the speaker – including when Laura Bush described George W. Bush as “the most eligible bachelor in Midland (Texas) marrying the old maid of Midland.”
Laura Bush started the speech by giving the crowd an update on her family, including the recent 86th birthday of George H.W. Bush; a new George W. Bush Presidential Center on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas; and how her daughter, Barbara, has formed a nonprofit public health care group called Global Health Care Corp., which has fellowship clinics in the United States and Africa.  
After some more stories about living in the White House and the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, Laura Bush talked about her book and its origins.
“It started in Texas and it ends in Texas,” she said.
Inside the book, Laura Bush said she describes the World Trade Center and how “George and I cried with the grieving families,” the many women she has helped through her position as former first lady, and a car accident she was involved in when she was 17 that killed a childhood friend. She has never spoken about the accident publicly.
Laura Bush read an excerpt about how she met and married George W. Bush.
She wasn’t interested at first, she said, because of a vague memory of him from the seventh grade, which was off-putting.
She went on to read about their whirlwind courtship that lasted barely three months before the wedding and the wedding itself, including how guests had to eat chicken and rice for two of the traditional wedding meals because Barbara Bush and Laura’s mother, Jenna Welch, didn’t consult one another before picking out the meals.
After the reading, Laura Bush answered many questions from the audience about her love of books and writing, her family and famous husband.
One audience member asked Laura Bush what her husband’s greatest accomplishment was while at the White House. “Liberating 50 million people in the Middle East,” she said.
Laura Bush said her greatest accomplishment was helping Middle Eastern women, who had few rights before the War on Terror.
George W. Bush will follow his wife’s lead with the publication of his memoir, “Decision Points,” which will hit bookshelves in November.
Copies of Laura Bush’s book “Spoken from the Heart,” are available at Kennebooks, which sponsored the Nonantum book reading, and many other local bookstores.

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.