A prolific author, his life and works attracted attention from the national press, influential figures, and major publishers and journalists.

[1] Born in Ridgeway, Lenawee County, Michigan, a small town southwest of Detroit, Bush moved with his family at a young age to Brooklyn, New York, at the time an independent city.

[5] After crossing the Pacific Ocean, the Coronet stopped in China, Calcutta, Malta (and elsewhere), giving him a view of the world that few had at the time.

[19] Forbes, in its first, one-time "Rich List" of 1918 (before starting the annual Forbes 400 in 1982), cited Irving T. Bush "of Bush Terminal fame" as one of those "undoubtedly earning several million a year" and just less wealthy than the 30 wealthiest Americans on the list, along with William C. Durant, founder of General Motors and William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate and Chicago Cubs baseball team owner.

Forbes named Bush within a brief list of notable American businessmen (including hotelier Ellsworth Milton Statler) who were examples of the type of businesspeople whose "industrious, diligent, vigilant foundation-laying" could lead to successful business enterprises.

Perhaps by way of expression of the Dutch ancestry of his family (and of New York), his 1905 townhouse at 28 East 64th Street in Manhattan, built by the firm of Kirby, Petit & Green, was "flamboyantly Jacobean, with a high, almost Flemish gable".

[27] Bush commissioned southern California architect Wallace Neff to design his winter home at Mountain Lake Estates in Florida, near the residence (and later tower) of his father's former business partner, Edward W. Bok.

Olmsted was known not only as the son of Central Park's designer, but among numerous other accomplishments, was notable for re-designing the White House grounds in 1930.

His portrait painting of the Russian princess Maria Worontzova (a name anglicized as Vorontsov) by Franz Xaver Winterhalter was inherited by his niece, and was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2003.

[33] Bush's acquisition of a portrait of Henry VII by Jehan de Perreal, a work from the early 16th century, made the news in 1929.

[34] In 1922 Bush became one of the founding trustees of New York City's Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists' cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others.

[38] Irving had met Marian, a fellow Michigan expatriate, when they worked together on a breadline in New York City's impoverished Bowery during the late 1920s.

His larger 185-foot-long (56 m) diesel yacht, Coronet, built for him in Germany in 1928 and placed under his wife's name during the Great Depression, was bought by the Navy during World War II and patrolled the Caribbean as the USS Opal (Pyc-8) before being transferred to Ecuador in 1943, where it was scrapped in 1960.