The two-masted schooner yacht Coronet, a 136-foot (41 m) vessel that Rufus had built during the mid-1880s, influenced Irving’s life, for the ocean race between the Coronet and the yacht Dauntless in March 1887 made Rufus T. Bush and the victorious Coronet famous—the New York Times devoted its entire first page for March 28, 1887 to the story. Rufus and Irving then circumnavigated the globe on the Coronet in 1888. Though they traveled overland and did not join the yacht until it arrived in San Diego in 1889, the Coronet was the first registered yacht to cross Cape Horn from East to West. 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. The Coronet was sold before Rufus’s death in 1890, when Rufus accidentally drank a fatal dose of aconite. Rufus T. Bush left an estate estimated at $2,000,000 to his wife and two sons. The family heirs quickly incorporated under the name The Bush Co. Bush, as a 21-year-old clerk for Standard Oil, could have lived off his inherited wealth and retired from the business life.

Bush was chair of the Continental Commerce Co., which had exclusive rights to market Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope overseas. The kinetoscope was the earliest motion picture viewer. Unlike later movie projectors, kinetoscopes could show a moving image to only one person at a time. The Continental Commerce Co. opened the first licensed European kinetoscope parlor in London in 1894.

Bush was named Chief Executive of the War Board of the Port of New York in 1917, during World War I. This would later become the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

In 1917, B.C. Forbes also placed Bush alongside Elbert Henry Gary (the namesake of Gary, Indiana). 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.

Bush owned two yachts that subsequently served as patrol boats in the United States Navy. In 1917, during the First World War, the navy bought his 164-foot-long (50 m) steam yacht Christabel and commissioned the vessel as the USS Christabel (SP-162), which took part in at least two actions against German U-Boats and was credited with sinking one. (See Navy History website) A sailor even won a Medal of Honor during one of these engagements. 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.

To induce railroads to use his car floats, (i.e. using the barges that transported railroad cars across New York Harbor), Bush had to resort to ordering dozens of carloads of hay from Michigan himself. To show shippers that using the wharves and warehouses at the new terminal could be profitable, Bush entered the banana business. Within two decades, the complex originally derided as “Bush’s Folly” became a great success. Though the complex was seized for government use during the First World War by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush complied with government demands. He even helped to design the Brooklyn Army Terminal for General Goethals in 1918.

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. Also on the board were the Galleries’ architect, William Adams Delano; Robert W. DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Clark.

Bush was frequently mentioned in newspaper and magazine articles and wrote a number of business-related stories of his own, including stories in Nation’s Business, Harper’s Weekly, and as president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, an article in Collier’s. Doubleday published his autobiography, Working with the World in 1928.

He also commissioned the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to design the grounds of the Florida estate. 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 1930 divorce in Reno, Nevada, and remarriage one hour later to dentist, artist, socialite, and philanthropist Marian Spore Bush made the front page of the New York Times as well as the “Milestones” section of Time magazine. Irving had met Marian, a fellow Michigan expatriate, while working together on a breadline in New York’s impoverished Bowery during the late 1920s. After their marriage, they lived at 280 Park Avenue along with Mrs. Marian Spore Bush’s niece Helen Tunison, who after Irving’s death, dedicated the statue of him at Bush Terminal in front of 3,000 people.

Like other wealthy Americans, Bush collected art. 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 only recently auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2003. 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.