It was 1994 and former first lady Barbara Bush was holding court with David Brudnoy, one of Boston’s most popular radio talk show hosts, as the switchboard lit up.

One caller was running for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney that year as the Libertarian Party nominee. She wanted some advice. “I’m a two-party man,” Bush replied, before offering the third-party woman some encouragement anyway.

This was less than two years removed from her husband receiving just 29 percent of the vote in Massachusetts as a sitting president, a scant 6 percentage points better than Ross Perot, himself no two-party man. It was also a 16-point drop from George H.W. Bush’s showing against Michael Dukakis, the commonwealth’s incumbent governor, in 1988.

Barbara was always the most popular Bush, however. She had a personal appeal that transcended partisan lines, so much so that Massachusetts Democrats were still interested in what she had to say long after they had tired of listening to her husband. In a statement following her death Tuesday, Bush 41 joked yet again about how this fact gave him “a complex.”

When Hillary Clinton succeeded Barbara Bush as first lady, it felt more jarring at the time than even the transition from Greatest Generation war hero to self-indulgent baby boomer taking place at the presidency. It was like watching Mamie Eisenhower be replaced by Gloria Steinhem.

Barbara was hardly a silent partner, but no one confused her with being a co-president or expected her to preside over healthcare reform. Her activism on behalf of literacy was presumably better than the drudgery her successor spoke of avoiding: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

Ouch. Yet in retrospect, Barbara Bush looks more like a transitional figure as the baton passed from one generation of American women to another — possibly why the Bushes and Clintons would ultimately get along so famously.

When Barbara Bush was invited to give the 1990 commencement address at Wellesley College, from which Hillary Clinton graduated, some students protested the honor should have gone to a career woman instead. She responded with characteristic grace and good humor, eliciting cheers.

“Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse — and I wish him well,” Bush said.

“We are in a transitional period right now,” she acknowledged in her speech. “Maybe we should adjust faster, maybe we should adjust slower. But whatever the era, whatever the times, one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children — they must come first.”

Included in her remarks was this quintessentially conservative sentiment: “Your success as a family … our success as a society depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house.”

When the Bush political team tried at the 1992 Republican National Convention to thread the needle between the “family values” rhetoric beloved by the base and which offended a rising number of voters who didn’t see their own families in it, they used Barbara’s address to the delegates to do so.

“We’ve met heroic single mothers and fathers who have told us how hard it is to raise children when you’re doing it all alone,” she said. “We’ve talked to grandparents who thought their child-raising days were over, but are now raising their grandchildren because their children can’t. We’ve visited literacy classes where courageous parents were learning to read and continuing their education so they could make a better life for their families. And we’ve held crack babies and babies with AIDS and comforted other victims.”

For most of our history, it was easier for a first lady to avoid political controversy, of course. Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt were not the norm. Michelle Obama was relatively subdued politically, Melania Trump has been almost entirely apolitical.

It is almost impossible to imagine someone being as outspoken as Barbara Bush was — consider even her criticism of President Trump as a “comedian” and a “showman” — while remaining as popular as she did for decades. Even as her husband and son saw their once-astronomical job approval ratings fade, her popularity endured.

Like her famous pearl necklaces, Barbara Bush was both something vital from living memory and also a representative of a bygone era.