4

SPOKANE

Nicknames are indicative of a change from a given to an achieved identity and they tell us something of the nick named individual’s interaction with his fellows.

— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964) ¹

Old Spokane, called Spokane Falls, was little more than a post for trading with the Spokane and Couer d’Alene Indians. When the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the settlement boomed overnight, attracting the Wild West’s familiar warring elements — “respectable” people, including mining barons, and transient loggers, miners, and other laborers lured by liquor, gambling, and prostitution. The hell-raisers had access to opium, provided by Chinese who had been brought in to lay track and were then forced to live in the town’s dark back alleys. The values of the more conservative city fathers began to win out in 1889, the year Washington won statehood, when a fire razed thirty-two blocks of the rowdy downtown district. The townsmen set about rebuilding the city, using red brick and cast iron instead of wood. They imported architects with a taste for terra-cotta. Ordinances were passed to make life harder for those who did not fit in. “Box” theaters, which provided whores and whiskey in balconied boxes, were banned; saloons were shuttered on Sundays.

Spokane {Falls was dropped in 1891) flourished as the commercial hub of the Inland Empire, a wintergreen and dun-colored expanse that wrapped its 150 miles around scores of towns, agricultural and mineral riches, forests and streams, seventeen lakes, a rushing river, and falls that were claimed to rival Niagara. ² The opening of the railway, in 1881, and the Coeur d’Alene gold rush, two years later, transformed the city and its surroundings. But the Northern Pacific’s encroaching yards and warehouses spread over Spokane like a blotting shadow, overtaking the riverfront and ultimately sealing the city from its breathtaking views of falls and rapids. ³

Yet “the Bond which Unites us with the Rest of the World,” ⁴ as the Northern Pacific characterized itself, brought Spokane undeniable dominance east of the Cascades. The population, which numbered 350 in 1880, had grown to nearly 100,000 by 1906, when Kate Crosby and her children, exhausted and distempered from the blistering heat and rattling journey, stepped from the train into a streaked sunset and saw Harry, smiling in his straw hat beside a rented horse and wagon, eager to show them their new home.

The driver helped load the valises and, turning the wagon north, retraced much of the route Harry took from work every day on the trolley, back through the business district and across the Spokane River to the residential areas. They proceeded east of Division Street, the baseline from which avenues are numbered, to a developing working-class enclave known as the Holy Land, for its Catholic churches, schools, convent, seminary, and orphanage. When they reached the yellow two-story house at 303 East Sinto Avenue, Harry unlocked the door and switched on an electric light, a convenience they had not enjoyed in Tacoma. He pointed out the carefully installed furniture, the groceries, the indoor plumbing.

As the luggage was carried inside, Kate collapsed onto a chair in the living room. The older boys explored the upstairs bedrooms where they would double up — Larry and Everett in one room, Ted and Harry in another, Catherine and the baby in the third. Their parents slept downstairs in a room off the main area. Harry knew the reunion occasioned as much resignation as cheer. In a 1937 account Ted and Larry describe Kate as a woman who renounced self-pity about what she had left behind; she had “acquiesced in her husband’s decision to start anew” and considered herself a pioneer now. ⁵ In later years, however, she complained to Bing that they had arrived with “very short funds” and ran high food and fuel bills, while her husband breezily dismissed her financial worries. ⁶

Nothing better symbolized the family’s ambivalence about Dad’s spending than the acquisition of a “talking machine” during their first Spokane autumn, days after Kate enrolled her three oldest boys in nearby Webster Grade School. (The Holy Land did not yet have a parochial elementary school.) Harry arrived home late one evening with a huge box — a gift, he claimed, from a man who owed him favors. Beaming, he unpacked an Edison Phonograph, a machine that played cylinders with a wind-up lever and amplified them through a bell-like horn. He also brought out recordings of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and — to soften his wife — “The Merry Widow Waltz.” Kate mellowed, and the extravagance was happily accepted. But her concern about Harry’s easy way with a buck was not easily allayed; the wariness died hard in her, and she passed it on to her children. Even toward the end of his life, when Bing boasted of his father buying the neighborhood’s first phonograph, he allowed that his old man had probably used the grocery money.

The marvelous machine, patented nearly three decades earlier by Thomas Edison, whose hopes for it were no grander than for a Dictaphone, filled the house with trebly, tinny, yet vividly exuberant and often exotic sounds. Radio, as an entertainment medium, was more than twenty years in the future. But for now they had this pipeline to the world and its music. By the time the Edison and its cylinders were replaced by a phonograph that played platters, Dad had a collection ranging from the Peerless Quartet to The Mikado to such singers as John McCormack (“Mother Machree,” McCormack’s theme, was one of his favorites), Harry Lauder, Henry Burr, Denis O’Sullivan, and Al Jolson. Of the Irish tenors, Bing preferred McCormack: “I knew all his songs and I thought he was a wonderful singer with great appeal, great sincerity, and a quality in his voice like a bird.” ⁷But the sound that mesmerized the boy was the Broadway yawp of the dynamic Jewish minstrel, Al Jolson, whose intensity shattered Spokane’s calm surface.

Harry had reason to feel secure about his prospects. A year earlier Spokane’s Heiber Brewery, a modern plant with an annual capacity of 110,000 barrels of brew and malt, had switched hands to three partners, John Lang, William Huntley, and Charles Theis. ⁸ They bought it — and two plots of real estate — for $300,000. Lang, a canny German-born businessman transplanted from San Francisco by way of Tacoma, changed the firm’s name to Inland Brewing & Malting Co., bought another six adjacent lots, built a cold-storage plant and bottling works, and opened a wholesale agency in Moscow, Idaho. During this expansion, he hired Harry as bookkeeper. Though modestly paid, Harry was attached to a growing business in a growing community. True, many deplored the shameful product; the company offered home delivery to every part of the city in “plain wagons, plain cases.” ⁹ Even Harry hid his spirits. But the days of temperance fanatics like Carrie Nation were gone, or so most people thought.

The family settled readily into the neighborhood. As Kate recalled, “All around us were young married couples, congenial and all of a sort in tastes, economic position and general outlook. Nobody was wealthy. Everybody was happy.” ¹⁰ In the fall of 1908, she walked young Harry to the Webster School and registered him in first grade, though he was only five, the proper age for kindergarten. Webster did not offer kindergarten, so perhaps she lied about his age, impatient to get him out from under her feet. Yet Harry had plainly usurped his mother’s attentions. Whatever else charmed Kate about her jug-eared, towheaded youngest boy, she cannot have failed to see herself mirrored in his face.

The older boys were different, easier to describe: Larry was bookish, soft-spoken, owlish in glasses not unlike his father’s; Everett was pugnacious, a provocateur with little interest in school and defiantly sure of himself; Ted was quiet, a loner, a diligent and imaginative child who wrote stories and studied electronics. The three older boys looked like their father: they had the rounded, fleshy Crosby face and small, dark eyes. Harry, too, had his father’s thin nose and thinning scalp. Still, he was decidedly a Harrigan, the only boy to inherit his mother’s cool, prominent, hooded blue eyes; her prim lips; and the triangular jaw she got from her mother. Even the way his right cheek folded at the mouth in an irrepressible smirk linked him to Kate. In her later photographs, that smirk is as close as she got to smiling.

The Harrigan moodiness was also familiar, as were his quickness to take offense and his indisputable charm. Everyone who knew young Harry would speak of his constant singing and whistling that heralded his arrival. He was given more leeway than his brothers, his father conceded. “We were both so lenient that it’s no wonder our other boys called Bing ‘Mother’s and Dad’s pet.’ Not that he was spoiled. He got his tannings. But he — well, he was different in a way. Made it sort of hard to spank him much.” ¹¹

In third grade he was informally and indelibly renamed. It was 1910, the year a local matron, Mrs. John Bruce Dodd, founded a movement to establish a national Father’s Day. Harry, six years old, discovered a full-page feature in Sunday’s Spokesman-Review, “The Bingville Bugle.” Written and illustrated by humorist Newton Newkirk, of the Boston Post, the “Bugle” was a broad parody of a hillbilly newsletter, with gossipy tidbits, minstrel quips, creative spelling, mock ads, and hayseed caricatures. Harry Lowe told writer Quentin Reynolds that his boy pestered grown-ups to read it to him. He’d point to the page and plead, “Bing! Bing!” until someone gave in. ¹²

One older boy he did not have to pester much was fifteen-year-old Valentine Hobart, who lived two doors away. Valentine liked Harry and shared his enthusiasm for the “Bugle,” which the Spokesman-Review dispersed not in the comics section (its drawings served primarily as teasers for the lengthy text) but in a supplement filled with stories by Jack London, H. Rider Haggard, O. Henry, W. W. Jacobs, and other popular writers. The “Bugle” motto boasted, THE LEADING PAPER OF THE COUNTRY — BRIGHT, BREEZY, BELLICOSE, BUSTLING, and augured with remarkable accuracy the yokel humor that Arkansas-born comedian Bob Burns popularized on Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall in the 1930s. It incorporated back-fence scuttlebutt (“There was a light in the front parlor of the Perkins’ residence last Satterday ev’g until as late as 9:30 P.M.… Tom staid a little mite later than usual on this occashion, didn’t he Sadie?”); “pomes” by “well knowed pome writer, Miss Sally Hoskins”; recipes for items such as harness grease; drama reviews (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Played by Real Actor Folks, was Give in the Town Hall to a Large and Intelligent Audience”); and hard news (“Hank Dewberry had a turrible experience with his red bull thet he will remember with loathing as long as he lives”). ¹³

Harry had an infectious and appreciative laugh, and Hobart took a shine to him, calling him Bingo from Bingville. ¹⁴ Shorn of its last vowel, the improbable nickname stuck. Other versions of its origin were later publicized. One had him named for a floppy-eared character in the parody named Bingo, though Newkirk never actually drew such a creature. A Paramount Pictures press release explained that as a boy, Bing played cowboys and Indians, cocking his fingers like a gun and shouting, “Bing bing bing,” a tale reprinted for decades to come. Everett, a fount of misinformation, replaced the cowboy story that he helped popularize with a third version, in which Bing’s name was earned with a baseball bat, which he used to knock out clean hits called “bingles.” ¹⁵

Bing was sensitive about the genesis of his name. Though notoriously free with what Huck Finn called “stretchers” and indifferent to most accounts of his life and career, he corrected Paramount’s press release (which perpetuated numerous errors he let stand) in order to ground “The Bingville Bugle” in his history. But he never discussed the more intriguing issue of why a grown man cultivates a childhood nickname. In The Bank Dick, W. C. Fields considers a name: “Og Oggleby. Sounds like a bubble in a bath.” What then does Bing sound like: the direct hit on a spitoon? The NBC chimes? The collision of two martinis? If nothing else, it conveys the affection of its bestowers.

After Hobart named him, only his mother persisted in calling him Harry. In school he signed his work Harry, but even his teachers took to calling him Bing. The name would be used by his wives and lovers, colleagues and partners, family and friends all his life. From the outset of his career, it seemed as natural and fitting and finally as commonplace as Tom, Dick, or Elvis. The name disarms, flatters the wary, demands a certain conviviality of all who approach. Bing. El Bingo. Le Bing. Bing Kuo Shi Bi. Der Bingle. Rarely has a nickname so aptly defined the person it identified. He was Bing at all times, except before the law and the church. He reserved Harry for his alter ego in a running 1940s radio skit (a character of the “Moonlight Bay” era, he explained, his father’s generation) and occasions of high seriousness, like meeting the Pope. And he handed it down to his fourth and fifth sons.

Bing was a solid if unremarkable student at Webster, popular and able to hold his own in and out of the classroom, even though he was a year younger than his classmates. To the dismay of his teachers, he did not have to work hard to do well and sometimes appeared to do no work at all. He was considered bright but lazy. A good friend, Francis Corkery (who would become president of Gonzaga University), thought of him as happy-go-lucky, too carefree to be a true leader; he recalled that Bing was always ready to go along when the gang raided fruit trees for apples and cherries. Francis and Bing had jackknives and whittled together. Corkery remembered him as good-natured and always singing. Though shy with girls, Bing was outgoing with boys and good at sports, despite his small stature. In fourth grade Frank and Bing played on the Webster School baseball team. In his dark jersey with striped sleeves and leggings, Bing stands in the front row of a team picture, hands on hips, eager and poised.

Gertrude Kroetch, Bing’s fourth-grade teacher, remembered his class practicing ovals in penmanship. She had set a rhythm, counting fours. All the kids did the ovals except Bing, who, finger cocked and one eye closed, shot his classmates one by one with an imaginary gun. Not wanting to interrupt her counting, Miss Kroetch pantomimed her own gun and fired it at Bing, who began to “make those ovals furiously,” ¹⁶ His mother recalled an afternoon when he was sent home from school with a note. Bing had disrupted the class with his “whispered remarks and pantomime.” The next time it happened, he was sent to the principal. “What did [the principal] do?” Kate asked him. “He dealt with me,” said Bing. “And?” “That’s all. I think I get the idea now.” ¹⁷ The principal had bent Bing over a chair and whacked him with a yardstick.

Corporal punishment was hardly unknown to him, notwithstanding the parental favoritism. If Dad tended to disappear when a licking was to be administered, Kate was willing; and the children feared her hefty wooden hairbrush and strap. Her implacable authority earned Kate a level of respect denied Harry, but something less than love, perhaps because her approval was so often linked to her ambitions. She was always searching for a star. When Kate thought Ted might become a priest, she relieved him of chores; when she decided Catherine could succeed on Broadway, she insisted on years of piano lessons no matter the cost. The children claimed to venerate her for being steadfast and sensible, yet privately they found her manipulative and severe. One way or another, she was setting up each of them to disappoint her. In later years four of her children — Bing emphatically not among them — conceded that despite their admiration and respect for their mother, they never truly loved her. ¹⁸

In addition to meting out punishment, Kate allocated chores, settled disputes, and governed family traditions. Mary Rose considered her an extraordinary woman but noted that for all the bother over birthdays, they were observed with a cake and never a party. Kate disbursed Harry’s wages, and when they weren’t sufficient, she emphasized his failure by dramatically resorting to a teapot, her emergency bank. “My father didn’t make a great deal of money,” Bing said. “My mother raised us on his small salary and we all got through college somehow.” ¹⁹ Perhaps he hoped to instill in his own children the reverence he felt toward her when he, too, used a strap, with terrible results, as he repeatedly acknowledged. Kate, after all, earned him his success: “My mother was such a wonderful woman and she did so many good things and so much good work and she wanted success and happiness for me. Maybe the Lord, to make her happy, had good things happen to me.” ²⁰

Harry had no illusions about who ruled the roost. Asked to comment on his world-renowned son in 1940, he volunteered:

My wife really knows much more about him than I do. Not that he’s a stranger to me! But Mother — well, you know how boys act toward their mothers. I guess I’ve always been the easy-going father. Bing takes after me in that respect. Nobody can rush him either. I remember the times I’d come home from work and how often I’d be greeted with the story of some disturbing antic of his during the day. My wife always would say, “Now, Harry, you must speak to Bing. He’s been very hard to manage today.” I’d look very indignant, promise some sort of punishment, then watch Kate do the disciplining. I just couldn’t bring myself to punish Bing — or any of the boys. ²¹

Bing considered Harry’s serenity his primary legacy. “Whether inherited or not,” Bing once said, “his ability to relax has helped me in a life which has had its share of pressure. I don’t worry seriously about anything.” ²²

A block west of the Crosby home lived Helen and Agnes Finnegan, sisters who taught Bing in fifth and sixth grades, respectively. Helen remembered him as roly-poly and likable, and was proud to claim that he played his first stage role in her class, as a singing jumping bean, one of twelve (Corkery was another) who vaulted across the stage on pogo sticks in a presentation called Beebee. In sixth and seventh grades, Bing was introduced to two venerable theatrical conventions, often revisited during his career; he appeared in blackface for a school benefit and in a pink-and-white-checkered dress for a Christmas play adapted from the Ladies’ Home Journal. His fine voice was much admired. “We think Hollywood has ruined Harry’s voice,” Helen Finnegan complained to a reporter in 1946. “He sang much better before he became a crooner.” ²³ Agnes remembered him as clean but sloppy, with his shirttail out, always chewing pencils or gum or both. He had straw-colored hair, a creamy complexion, outsize ears, china-blue eyes, and a tendency toward chubbiness.

Music was always heard at home. As Harry’s record collection increased, Bing memorized the latest songs. “I had a constant succession of them in my head. And I had to whistle or sing to get them out.” ²⁴ The phonograph was always on, except after supper on Sunday, when the family gathered in the living room to sing. Accompanied by Harry on mandolin or guitar, and by a glowing fire in winter, Kate’s contralto fused with Harry’s tenor on “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Sweet Adeline,” “In the Good Old Summer Time,” and “Mother Machree,” among others. Harry conducted a male quartet that included himself, Bing, Larry, and Ev. Ted, an inveterate tinkerer, kept his distance from the harmonizing but a few years later made his own valiant contribution by building a crystal radio that picked up new songs from a station in Seattle.

The girls took turns at the piano, recently transported from the house in Tacoma. Harry paid fifteen dollars for cartage, the price of a new suit he was obliged to sacrifice. It was a present for Kate, who wanted the girls to learn how to play and needed cheering up. Her childless sister, Annie, had written to boast how well her husband was doing and rubbed salt in the wound by offering to adopt Kay (Catherine). ²⁵ Only in her children was Kate richer than Annie, yet she made it clear she appreciated the offer and was inclined to consent. This time, Harry put his foot down. They were not so poor that they had to farm out one of their children. By way of saying no, thank you, he reclaimed her piano. Kay quickly revealed musical talent and promised to be a beauty. Kate envisioned stardom for her.

It wasn’t Dad, but a member of Kate’s family — her youngest brother, George, then a robust man in his early thirties — who became Bing’s first idea of an exemplary performer. An enthusiastic amateur, George made frequent visits from the coast. Bing adored him and spent many hours at his side. In later years, when Bing reminisced about George, his voice would rise a couple of tones and the phrases would tumble out with a cantering dispatch:

My mother had a brother, George Harrigan, a great singer in the Tacoma-Seattle area. He was a court reporter in the local legislature and also in the courts in Seattle and Tacoma, and of course his theme song was “Harrigan,” taken from the Cohan song. And he was the biggest favorite singing around that area that ever occurred there. He was a great guy and had a terrific voice — big, high, loud, powerful tenor. Anytime he appeared, everybody’d holler, “Harrigan,” and he’d go: “H-A-double R-I-G-A-N spells Harrigan / Divil a man can say a word agin me,” and I learned a lot just watching him. He could tell stories in any dialect you ever heard of. He should have gone into show business, but he married young, had about five or six children, and never could get away. He’d have been a sensational star with his ability to do dialect stories and sing. He was six foot two, black hair with blue eyes. Handsome man. ²⁶

During Christmas 1912 Kate, nearing forty, revealed that for the first time in six years she was pregnant. The timing was propitious. Inland Brewery’s tank capacity increased by another 25,000 barrels, and Harry received a raise and a new title — cashier. Spokane felt flush. Five years before, Barnum & Bailey’s circus elephants refused to step onto the steel Monroe Street Bridge, which collapsed shortly afterward. Now its replacement was completed and was touted as the longest concrete span in the country. Spokane boasted sixty-two miles of paved streets, 600 miles of concrete walks, thirty-five public schools, ten hospitals and asylums, 112 churches. The Spokane-Coeur d’Alene interurban electric railway, leaving every few minutes, transported thousands of swimmers and picnickers to Liberty Lake, the area’s most popular resort. The fabulous Davenport Hotel, designed by architect Kirtland Cutter at a cost of $3 million, opened its doors in 1914, attracting celebrities and royalty with its glass pillars and lobby birds, plumbing that siphoned drinking water to every room, and a washing machine to polish silver money.

Even the entertainment world rallied. After city officials banned box and variety theaters, performers were engaged to lure skeptical customers into nickelodeons that were little more than converted storefronts. The first significant theater in Spokane was the Auditorium, built in 1890, with the second-largest stage west of Minneapolis. It presented musicals, operas, concerts, and dramas. The more daring Pantages and Washington theaters offered traveling vaudeville. At the outset of 1915, two movie theaters, the Liberty and the Clemmer, opened their doors. The Spokesman-Reviewcrowed, “It is doubtful if any city the size of Spokane can boast of two such moving picture theaters.” ²⁷

In this environment, and with the financial help of Inland Brewery, the ever optimistic Crosbys believed they could finally realize the dream of building their own home in Spokane. Kate got the ball rolling. In June 1911 the Pioneer Educational Society (a Jesuit organization) sold her, “for the sum of one dollar and other considerations,” a lot on East Sharp Avenue with a proviso that the buyer erect a “dwelling house worth not less than three thousand dollars.” ²⁸ Within weeks Inland Brewery bought the warranty deed for $6,500, enabling Kate and Harry to take out a mortgage. With additional financial help from Kate’s sister, Anne, and Harry’s nephew Lloyd, a timber executive, construction was completed in eighteen months, at which time Inland Brewery signed a quitclaim for a dollar and agreed to recoup its loan through payroll deductions.

Six months later, in July 1913, the Crosbys left the yellow house they had rented for seven years and moved a few blocks to the two-story clapboard house at 508 East Sharp Avenue, one block north of Gonzaga University and St. Aloysius Church. They could see the church steeple through their rear windows. In the front of the house, a concrete walk led to wooden steps and a porch that ran the full width. The house, painted dark brown and overhung with deep eaves, had four bedrooms plus a sleeping porch on the second floor; the amenities included a coal and wood furnace and two bathrooms. The living-and-dining-room area was appointed with a small fireplace trimmed in brown-stained fir, a bookcase, and a window seat. The modest backyard, ringed with climbable locust trees, abutted an alleylike pathway through which the boys could cut to school. Bing carved his mark on a supporting two-by-four in the basement: H.C. ’16.

On August 25 Kate delivered her seventh child, named George Robert (Bob) after her brother George Robert Harrigan. ²⁹ Bing, at ten, was no longer the youngest son. “Mother told me one thing and I really laugh when I think about it,” Bob recalled. “Bing was the youngest boy, so he wound up with all the old bicycles, the old clothes, the old roller skates, all of that. And when I was born, in the front room of the house up in Spokane, each one of the kids was allowed to come in and see me. When Bing came in, he said to Mother, lying in bed with me in her arms, ‘What is it?’ She said, ‘It’s a boy.’ And he said, ‘Well, it better be,’ and he walked out of the room. And from then on, he took care of me, good care of me. He was a wonderful brother. Outsmarted me all the time.” ³⁰

Gonzaga University is located on East Boone, named for a descendant of Daniel, so the kids Bing ran with called themselves the Boone Avenue gang. Spokane, a mining community at heart, had never completely cleaned away the stain of Wild West excess, and the earliest tales Bing remembered hearing were of local gambling establishments at which his father took an “occasional flutter at the wheels of chance.” ³¹ Miners tramped through regularly, and the downtown alleyways harbored all the secrets that make urban life a trial for the righteous. Bing explored them fully. He knew each alley, theater, swimming hole, rat’s nest, playing field, park, and lake. The gang committed petty crimes, landing Bing in the clink more than once; on one occasion Kate, advised of his internment by the arresting officer, told him to keep her son overnight to teach him a lesson. Still, the gang’s crimes were piddling ones: swiping candy and ice cream, drinking, smoking anything they could light, putting up their dukes, and sneaking into movie theaters. The urchins in Bing’s circle produced a priest, lawyer, doctor, judge, boxer, and football Hall of Famer, as well as an entertainer. Bing stayed in touch with some of them his entire life.

The episode that cemented his stature among his peers — never told the same way twice — involved his challenging one Jim Turner to a fight in defense of his “plump and easygoing” sister Mary Rose. ³² She had been either called “fatty” or caricatured in a picture, which was either distributed to the other kids or drawn on a blackboard. Jimmy Cottrell (later a junior welterweight champ and, with Bing’s help, a Paramount Pictures prop man) was a member of the Logan Avenue gang but was present at the 1914 tussle. He remembered a large crowd of kids circling a parking lot (an alley according to Bing, a playground according to Mary Rose), cheering the contestants. Bing bloodied Turner’s nose (undisputed), earning his sister’s devotion and subdued approval from his parents, especially Kate, who thought him chivalrous.

Bing was closest to Mary Rose of all his siblings, while Kay bonded with Ted. These lifelong pairings were viewed with irony, because Mary Rose — a candid, funny, exceedingly well liked woman who greatly enjoyed Bing’s reflected glory — was personally much more like Ted. Kay, who was quiet, private, and fiercely independent, was Bing’s double. In later years she never gave an interview, never boasted of her famous brother, never confided in anyone when she was dying of cancer. Of the seven children, only Kay and Bing would never be divorced.

Yet Mary Rose was his favorite. “Whenever I had problems,” Mary Rose said, “I always went to Bing and he calmed me down and advised me what I should do.” ³³ She admired his remarkable memory, apparent from early childhood, and the way he taught himself to do a time step and play drums. His pet name for her was Posie, and he took her ice-skating, sharing his old black skates. “We liked to swim and to skate and none of the others did, particularly,” Mary Rose said. ³⁴ Jim Pool, the last of her three husbands, noted that when Everett was managing Bing and found him intransigent, he would ask Mary Rose to intercede. When Bing noticed Mary Rose and Jim driving an old car, he bought them a new one. “In my book,” Mary Rose said, “he had it made when he was little. I always knew he’d amount to a lot.” ³⁵

On September 18, 1915, as Bing commenced his final year at Webster, grandfather Dennis Harrigan Jr. passed away at his home in Tacoma, at eighty-three. ³⁶ Bing had been a baby the last time they had seen each other. Six years before, Dennis had been struck by falling timber while inspecting construction of the governor’s mansion, and he never entirely recovered. He was survived by a brother, seven children, fourteen grandchildren (half of them Kate’s), and a widow, Katie, who would become the subject of the opening anecdote in Bing’s 1953 memoir.

In Bing’s story, his grandmother Katie, who is dying, asks her “Irishman” husband, Dennis, for his hand. “Katie,” he says, “it’s a hand that was never raised against ye.” Eyes dilating, she answers, “And it’s a damn good thing for ye it wasn’t!” Upon delivering that insuperable finish, she expires. ³⁷ It’s a fine tale, paying homage to a spirited Irish woman, and may have some basis in truth (perhaps regarding Bing’s great-grandparents). But Dennis died three years before Katie, and neither ever spent a day in Ireland. Bing’s confusion on this point is instructive. Bing’s family neither visited Dennis when he was ill nor attended his funeral. As an adult, Bing demonstrated a categorical aversion to funerals, memorial services, and hospitals.

Bing’s skill as a young athlete was as obvious as his musical talent. Too small to make much of an impression in basketball or football, he was game enough to try hard at both as well as boxing and handball. He excelled in baseball and made the Junior Yard Association and varsity teams year after year, first at third base, then center field. He occasionally fantasized about running off to play professionally, and for a season played semipro on a team sponsored by Spokane Ideal Laundry. In his movies he would often incorporate bits of business to display his agility with a ball, though the closest he came to realizing his pro ambitions was buying a piece of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1946.

Bing was even better at swimming. He learned the hard way. McGoldrick’s lumberyard inhabited a portion of the northern bank of the Spokane River, which was close enough to the Gonzaga complex to disrupt classes with noise and smoke. In the years before the city created a network of public swimming pools, the millpond at the river’s bend, bordered by a sandbar and accessed by logs dumped there for storage, was a deadly lure to neighborhood kids. Some drowned trying to brave the swift rapids beyond the sandbar; many more died trying to walk the log booms to and from the pond. Forbidden from going anywhere near McGoldrick’s, the Boone gang and others could not resist the challenge.

The boys — Bing and Ted, Frank Corkery and his older brother, Boots, Ralph Foley, Phil Sweeney and his brother, Dan, and half a dozen others — were clustered in the family barn of one of its members when Foley (later a superior court judge and the father of the Speaker of the House Tom Foley) challenged them to join him for a swim in the millpond. They walked south on Standard Street, past Gonzaga and the vacant lots and the railroad tracks, until they reached the narrow sandbar and saw older boys, including Everett, cavorting in the middle of the river. Despite warnings from passersby and the swimmers, they gingerly crossed a cluster of logs, disrobed, and jumped in. During that first adventure, Bing and Ted were painfully sunburned. They managed to hide their discomfort at lunch, but their vocal suffering alerted Kate that night. She insisted, in vain, that Harry whip them, but she soon took pity and applied a reeking goose grease to their inflamed backs.

As Corkery recalled, Bing was a millpond regular, swimming naked with the others and shocking passengers on the trains that rolled by the log-boom platforms from which they dove. He learned to swim in those currents and revisited them long after the pool at Mission Park opened, six blocks from his home. Jimmy Cottrell swam with Bing at Mission Park but, like him, preferred the excitement of the river: “Bing was a good diver, I admired him. We used to sneak off together to the Spokane River and see who could swim across.” ³⁸ Another admirer of Bing’s watery talents was Mary Sholderer, one of seven girls in a gregarious and generous German family that fed and looked after the Crosby kids. (“We spent about as much time in the Sholderers’ home as we did in our own,” Bing said.) ³⁹ She would not venture to McGoldrick’s but sometimes walked Bing to the Mission pool, carrying Bob in her arms. She watched him dive and swim, and praised his agility. Mary sang soprano at St. Aloysius and, with three of her sisters, grew old in the family house. The beloved spinsters became known for the birthday parties they threw for neighborhood dogs. Bing never forgot Mary’s kindness or failed to visit the Sholderer home when he returned to Spokane.

From Mary and the other kids, Kate learned how well Bing handled himself in the water. In the summer of 1915 he was hired as towel boy for the Mission Park pool locker room. The following summer Kate coddled him into competing in a citywide swimming contest. On the big day, a couple of weeks after graduating Webster, Bing courted the resentment of his brothers as he lazed about, singing Blanche Ring’s vaudeville hit “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers,” resting up for the 2:00 P.M. meet. Kate relieved him of chores and prepared his favorite meal, pork chops. To his initial dismay, Kate also insisted on accompanying him to the pool. She did no harm. He won seven medals, including first place in diving and second place in the 100- and 220-yard speed events. When he resumed work at the pool that week, he was advanced from towel boy to lifeguard.

That same summer Bing added to his finances by caddying. He talked members out of old clubs and played the course on Mondays, becoming obsessed with golf, which replaced swimming as his preferred exercise. During his years in Hollywood, Crosby became an expert golfer, but he had some qualms about keeping a swimming pool and filled in at least one. The presumed reason was his fear that the neighborhood children might have accidents, generating lawsuits. Twenty-three summers after his triumph at the Mission Park pool, Bing attempted to exercise his swimming skills and almost had an accident of his own, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Driving back from a golf match with his friend mining heir Harvey Shaeffer, Bing suggested they catch the show at the Billy Rose Aquacade, featuring Eleanor Holm and Bing’s friend from Hollywood Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimming champ who became the definitive Tarzan. As Weissmuller introduced the divers, who were climbing up to a fifty-foot board, Bing casually mentioned that he could dive from that height. Shaeffer bet him a hundred dollars he could not. They went backstage. Telling no one but Weissmuller of his plan, Bing borrowed a farcical full-body swimsuit and matching hat and anonymously waited his turn. When it came, he embraced the caper with comic aplomb and was airborne before realizing that his pipe was clamped between his teeth. Fearing it might be driven through his neck, he aborted an intended jackknife in favor of a feet-first plunge. He lost his pipe, incited a furious Billy Rose (who also feared accidents and lawsuits), and collected sixty-five dollars from Shaeffer, who would not accept the plunge as a dive.

Harry mused, “All of our children were musical, but I must admit I had a soft spot in my heart for Bing, because I liked to hear him sing.” He brought him down to the Spokane Elks Club and had Bing perform for the members. “The piano player of the Elks Quartet became so interested in Bing’s singing that he gave him lessons.” ⁴⁰ Those lessons, if they took place (Bing never spoke of them), would probably have been gratis. Kate took as focused an interest in his singing as in his swimming. “[She] gave me every break,” Bing said. “In fact, she took me to a teacher. I had about three lessons and she paid for them and she didn’t have the money to spare at the time. I think the lessons cost five dollars a session. He gave me some things to vocalize on, some scales on the piano, and I think I went about three times, but I kept up the vocalizing for a few years — I think it loosened me up. That’s the only formal musical training I ever had.” ⁴¹ In his memoir, Bing claims that the lessons petered out when the professor discouraged pop songs and emphasized tone production and breath control. But shortly after Kate’s death, he admitted the trouble was financial: “That fin, you know, every second week, was a little strong for my mother to come up with.” ⁴² Kay’s piano lessons, however, continued.

The Crosbys were now facing their worst crunch. On January 1, 1916, Washington went dry. The postboom cleanup, previously directed at gambling and prostitution, claimed one of the city’s major legitimate businesses, three years before the rest of the country had to answer to the Volstead Act. Prohibition and the concurrent sale of the big mines brought an end to Spokane’s growth years. Inland Brewery failed to accept or prepare for the drought, except with layoffs. Harry survived, at a drastically reduced salary, while the company tried to figure out what to do. The city chemist’s confirmation, on January 7, that there was no trace of alcohol in Inland’s “carbonated fizz near-beer” did nothing to stimulate sales. ⁴³ As things got worse, so did Harry’s wages. During some months he may not have been paid at all: for the years 1915 and 1916, he indicated no employment in his entry in the city directory.

In those dark days, Kate became preoccupied with Bing; just weeks before supervising his triumph at the Mission pool, she dressed her son in finery for his first formal musical performance. At a women’s function, he sang typically sentimental numbers such as “Ben Bolt,” a poem set to a German melody in 1848, ⁴⁴ and “A Perfect Day,” a 1910 hit by vaudevillian Carrie Jacobs-Bond. For an unsolicited encore, he held a leash in his hand and sang “My Dog Rover,” a ditty he loved. ⁴⁵ With little provocation, he would sing it in later years on well-lubricated hunting and fishing trips, though he never recorded it. Of the songs he sang that day, the one that seemed to bring out the most in him was a recently published secular hymn, “One Fleeting Hour.” ⁴⁶ With a broad range of eight whole notes and a forte-grande top-note finish, it was an imposing showpiece for the twelve-year-old. In the 1970s, when television interviewers asked him about his first experience before an audience, Bing unhesitatingly volunteered a few bars:

When the twilight of eve dims the suns last ray

And the shades of the night gather fast,

There’s one fleeting hour that I’ve pray’d would stay,

Full of joy and of pain that’s passed.

Yet he never performed it professionally. Bing found his first appearance mortifying. In addition to having to get gussied up, he had to endure a cool reception — nothing like the kind his exuberant uncle George enjoyed.

Bing had never been hesitant about singing for friends, but performing for church groups was another story, inclining him to play harder with the gang. “My mother dressed me up in some fantastic attire, the knickerbockers and the flowing ties,” Bing said. “That embarrassed me more than the singing, I believe. And of course the fellas I ran around with all thought singing was for girls or for sissies, certainly not for anyone who was going to be an athlete. Because we were mostly, as a group, concerned with rock fights and going down to the millpond and running logs and hooking rides on railroad trains and robbing the bakery wagon and things of that caliber, which were considered a little more adventurous and colorful than standing up in front of a ladies’ sodality and singing ‘One Fleeting Hour.’” ⁴⁷ He was reprieved for a while when his voice changed, after which he was less shy about asserting himself in style and repertoire.