PAUL A. "BUD" BUSH JR.

Paul "Bud" Bush Jr., 89, a former nurse, Air Force Veteran, curious traveler and lover of the arts, died of natural causes Monday, December 14, 2025 in the Piqua Manor Nursing Home. Born in Wapakoneta on February 16, 1936, to Paul Bush Sr. and Evelyn (Howell), Paul was educated in the town's parochial schools before attending the University of Dayton. Interested in nursing and intrigued by New York City, Paul transferred to the New York University College of Medicine, where he did his clinical work at Bellevue Hospital.

It was in New York City that Paul developed a taste for opera, classical music, jazz and fine dining, interests he would pursue for the rest of his life.

After graduating from the three-year NYU program in 1959, Paul enlisted in the United States Air Force as a second lieutenant. He attended the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at San Antonio, Texas, and trained as an air-evacuation paramedic. In 1960, he was posted to Korea, where he worked in a hospital in Seoul. During that stretch, he toured Japan by bullet train while on leave, developing a lifelong interest in travel, Asian culture, and food.

Paul returned to civilian life in 1962, working as a public-health nurse in Cincinnati before moving to Boston in 1968 to work in a clinic at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, where he hired and trained other nurses in the then-emerging technique of kidney dialysis.

He was then asked to open a satellite clinic at Lakeville Hospital in Lakeville, Massachusetts, and it was there that his life changed when he met his beloved wife-to-be Ann.

Earlier this year, he remembered that night. "I was waiting for her in a drug store at the soda counter, having cup of coffee, when she pulls up in a white Buick convertible, the finest car I'd ever seen. She's wearing a gorgeous, coral-colored knit dress with gloves up to elbows, a mink stole. She looked like a million bucks-something out of a Manhattan cocktail party."

They were married six months later in the spring of 1970 at Saints Martha and Mary Catholic Church in Lakeville, Massachusetts, thus beginning a 55-year love story that ended only when Ann died last May.

Paul and Ann lived together in Cincinnati; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Orlando and Bradenton, Florida; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Plymouth, Massachusetts. Paul worked a variety of nursing jobs in dialysis, psychiatry, quality assurance, Medicare fraud and home health care during that time.

Paul retired from nursing at 65, and he and Ann spent more than a decade in Florida and South Carolina before they moved in 2013 to Troy, Ohio, to be close to Paul's family. In retirement, they continued to travel, driving across country, and striking out on trips to the South, the West and Ireland.

Paul is survived by his brother, David Bush, and his wife Margo (Butzier) Bush of Piqua; his niece Kristi (Bush) Enz, and her husband Michael Enz, of Fletcher, Ohio; his niece Kathleen (McAloon) Convey, and her husband Kevin Convey of Brockton, Massachusetts; and many other nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.

A memorial service will be held in the spring in Massachusetts. Funeral arrangements are being provided to the family through the Jamieson & Yannucci Funeral Home, Piqua, Ohio. Guestbook condolences and expressions of sympathy, to be provided to the family, may be expressed through jamiesonandyannucci.com.