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TACOMA

There are literally millions of Crosby relatives around these parts.

— Burt McMurtrie, columnist (1948) ¹

Kate Crosby wouldn’t have to imagine for long. She was expecting when she and Harry moved into the house at 616 South N Street. On the third day of the New Year, 1895, Laurence Earl was born at home. Before the year was out, they moved to a better neighborhood, near Wright Park, and a bigger house to accommodate Harry’s mother, Cordelia, who lived with them for a few months. In that house, at 110 North Yakima, a second son, Everett Nathaniel, was born on April 5, 1896. The family’s fortunes changed when Harry lost his job with the Northern Pacific and was forced to scuffle for work through the depression years of 1897 and 1898. His plight may account for the four-year pause before more children arrived. The Crosbys moved twice more, never beyond the radius of a few blocks in the residential district just north of downtown Tacoma.

Harry’s luck changed in 1899, when he was hired as a clerk in the Pierce County treasurer’s office, under Treasurer Stephen Judson, who had been one of the Washington pioneers of the 1850s. ² The family was now able to rent a handsome three-story, many-gabled corner house at 922 North I Street, where their third son, Edward John, was born on July 30, 1900. Judson was defeated in the Republican sweep of 1902, but his successor, John B. Reed, promoted Harry to bookkeeper. That December Harry celebrated his good fortune by purchasing, for $850, two adjoining lots on J Street, between North Eleventh and North Twelfth, with the intention of building a residence he estimated would cost $2,500. ³ The deed was made out to his wife, who could never feel truly settled in a rental.

Construction at 1112 North J was completed ten months later, in the first weeks of a cold winter. Set on a grassy incline from the street, the wooden two-story frame house had wide eaves and a large front porch with three sets of double columns supporting a roof porch just below the second-story bedroom windows. Harry and Kate permitted themselves the luxury of a piano. Down the street they could see Puget Sound, and only three blocks away stood St. Patrick’s, the small wooden church that had served the community for a dozen years and where Edward (Ted) was baptized.

Kate was pregnant again during the construction, with a due date in mid-spring. As the day approached, the stinging April winds suddenly departed and she delivered her fourth son on Sunday, May 3, which the Daily Ledger declared AN IDEAL SUMMER DAY. ⁴

Kate, who had just turned thirty, and Harry, finally established in the city’s middle class, decided that this boy’s arrival merited a public announcement. For the first time, they alerted the newspapers of a newborn. When the Daily Ledger failed to print the item in “City News in Brief” until May 5, implying with the word yesterday that the great event had taken place on May 4, ⁵ Kate stipulated the correct date for its rival, the Tacoma Daily News(“Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby are receiving congratulations on the arrival of a son at their household May 3”), ⁶ and requested a correction from the Ledger, which appeared on May 7. ⁷

On May 31, accompanied by Kate’s younger brother Frank and his wife (the boy’s godparents), Harry and Kate carried the infant to St. Patrick’s for his baptism. ⁸ Harry was disappointed at not having a girl, but Kate placated him by naming the boy after him. For his middle name, however, she chose Lillis, after a neighborhood friend, circumventing a generational ranking of senior and junior (though both Harrys would often use those designations). Happy Harry cradled the infant in his arms, looked into blue eyes that would never darken, and gave forth in song, “Ten Baby Fingers and Ten Baby Toes.” ⁹

For all the decisiveness with which May 3, 1903, was flagged as Harry Lillis Crosby’s birthday, the date proved controversial in and out of family circles. ¹⁰ In all official accounts (generated by Paramount, Decca, the Crosby offices, and, most insistently, Bing himself), it was altered by one day and one year, to May 2, 1904. The true date was additionally obscured as two of his older brothers came to believe he was born in 1901. Bing lost the year early in his career at the conniving of Everett, who, acting as his manager, believed he was shaving three.

The first of young Harry’s two younger sisters, Catherine Cordelia, named after her mother and her recently deceased grandmother, arrived on October 3, 1904. ¹¹ The second, Mary Rose, with whom Harry developed a particular childhood affinity, followed on May 3, 1906. That Kate delivered four of her six children on the third day of the month is merely an actuarial oddity; that she delivered two on the same day of the same month created birthday havoc, as Mary Rose insisted on having the day to herself. ¹² Peace prevailed when Harry’s birthday was advanced by twenty-four hours. In later years Mary Rose would triumphantly produce the family Bible in which their father assigned Harry May 2.

By the time Mary Rose arrived, the family fortunes had once again bottomed out. Harry Crosby’s benefactor, John B. Reed, was ousted in the 1904 election by his former cashier, Edgar M. Lakin, who advanced Harry to the title of deputy in the county treasurer’s office. ¹³ Of the eight men working in the treasurer’s office, Harry had been there the longest. Yet he was fired late in 1905, presumably so that Lakin could reward a political crony. After several more firings, complaints that city employees were being dismissed on trumped-up charges grew widespread. In April 1906 the citizens of Tacoma approved a city charter amendment requiring a public hearing and ratification by a two-thirds majority of the city council before a city employee could be discharged.

The city’s indignation came too late to help Harry. In the first years of the century, Tacoma’s population had exploded from 38,000 to more than 84,000, but the expected fiscal boom was not forthcoming. ¹⁴ The economy was stymied by the consolidation of the timber industry and railroads. The increase in jobs did not keep up with the number of job hunters. Like many others disappointed with prospects on the coast, Harry began to think about the inland frontier and its burgeoning center, Spokane, 200 miles east, where logging and mining camps were proliferating as fast as they once had in Tacoma. The prospect of a fresh start was made more imperative by Harry’s liberal spending.

The very week he was fired, he had come home with tickets for The Merry Widow, insisting that they had been given him by a friend. He and Kate “enjoyed every minute of the show,” Ted recounted in a fanciful biography of Bing, noting with lingering embarrassment that Harry’s “sprees” exacerbated “their financial troubles on the Coast.” ¹⁵ Just how much embarrassment and debt Harry incurred is no longer possible to ascertain, but given Kate’s keen sense of social standing, such difficulties may have sparked her own willingness to leave their home, friends, parents, and siblings, especially her sister, Annie, whose prospering marriage made Kate more envious than she liked to admit. Bing would later praise his father’s hunch in recognizing Spokane as “a fine place for a man to raise his family,” ¹⁶ but he hinted at a darker motive in lauding it as a place where the people “don’t care who you are, what you’ve been, or what your reputation was before they met you. It’s how you handle yourself after you arrive there that counts.” ¹⁷

Within a week of his dismissal, Harry was visiting Spokane, soon to become one of the world’s great wheat centers. Where wheat is harvested, distilleries and breweries are sure to follow, and Harry landed a job as bookkeeper at the newly developed Inland Brewery. Harry sold the house on J Street to Annie and her husband, Ed Walsh, for a dollar. ¹⁸ The nominal figure may indicate the settlement of a debt or the intention to resume ownership at a future date. The Walshes never lived in the house but held on to it for many years before selling.

Harry had to begin work immediately, but Kate was in the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy with Mary Rose and could not withstand the long, jolting rail trip. So he went alone, securing the rental of a roomy four-bedroom house in Spokane’s Catholic district and fortifying it with furniture shipped from J Street. Kate and the children moved into a furnished house on South I Street, half a mile from their abandoned home and a couple of blocks from the austere box-frame house in which Annie and Ed Walsh lived and where the children could be distracted. Everett was charged with watching Harry until Mary Rose was safely delivered, though Kate remained ill and in bed for two months.

By early July Kate felt her strength returning, or recognized that the trip could be put off no longer. She said her good-byes and in the grueling midsummer heat transported herself, the baby, the five older children, and several valises to the station. They almost missed the train when the combative Everett disappeared to pursue an altercation with a newsboy. But he was located in time, and the seven Crosbys boarded the Northern Pacific, bound for the Inland Empire.

The times were changing as the Crosbys pulled up roots. The week Spokane’s Inland Brewery announced the expansion that made Harry’s job possible, a prankster in Chicago yelled “fire” outside a church during the Easter service, inciting a stampede that took the lives of four parishioners, three of them children; and a mob of 5,000 in Springfield, Missouri, destroyed a prison and hanged and burned three black teenagers accused of attacking a white woman, despite the woman’s assertion that they were not the culprits. (The mob inadvertently freed nearly forty white bona fide criminals, causing a panic throughout the area.) Three days later, at 5:13 A.M., a fierce rumbling woke San Francisco to the ordeal that demolished the city and stoked fires that raged for three days, taking a thousand lives and leaving 250,000 homeless — the nation’s worst disaster since the Johnstown flood of 1889.

It was the era in which Lincoln Steffens damned the shame of the cities and Upton Sinclair revealed that the bodies of Chicago meatpackers who drowned in mixing vats were processed with diseased cows and brought to market. New York tabloids ballyhooed the first of many “crimes of the century.” after a deranged wastrel, Harry K. Thaw, defended the honor of his wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, by murdering the architect and libertine Stanford White. His attorneys argued that Thaw suffered from “dementia Americana,” and his millions bought him several stays in a mental hospital while Nesbit augured talk-show renown by ventilating her cautionary tale on the vaudeville circuit.

And yet despite unreasoning fears and exploding racial and ethnic hatred, it was an era of heroes — of larger-than-life people who were honored without the slightest taint of cynical apprehension: builders, explorers, educators, thinkers, rebels, scientists, tinkerers, politicians, industrialists, labor leaders. The Spokesman-Review, the major Inland paper, published a front-page poll in which regional educators, intellectuals, and writers were asked to name the five greatest contemporary Americans. ¹⁹ The same men turned up on ballot after ballot: Teddy Roosevelt topped them all, followed by Thomas A. Edison, Charles W. Eliot, Edward Everett Hale, Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, Luther Burbank, Samuel Gompers, J. Pierpont Morgan. These men embodied the American character, enhanced the American profile, avowed an American century. Spokane fit the bill; after driving out the Palouse Indians in 1905, the city sprang forward.