5

GONZAGA

I was eight years with the Jesuits, four high school, four college. Yeah, pretty well indoctrinated.

— Bing Crosby (1976) ¹

As a student at Gonzaga High School, part of the small complex of redbrick buildings on Boone Avenue that made up Gonzaga University, Bing could almost roll out of bed and into class. He was often late. The assembled students listened for his unhurried approach: first the slamming of the back door, then a few bars of whistling, then a popular song as he ambled through his backyard to the end of the block, crossed Boone, and strolled into class. After he began haunting weekend vaudeville shows at the Pantages, he made a point of arriving early on Monday mornings to entertain the class with imitations of the comedians and singers who passed through town. Frank Corkery marveled at his ability to memorize routines down to the corniest gags. Far more unusual was Bing’s self-possession — his extraordinary presence of mind.

Once, before physics class, the gang lured Bing into a storage space, then locked him in just as the instructor arrived. Did he bang on the wall of that black hole and holler for someone to let him out? Hardly. He made no sound at all until the instructor, Francis Prange, uttered his first remarks, at which point Bing’s voice, crooning “The Missouri Waltz,” floated through the room. The teacher stopped, as did the singing. Prange glanced out the window, looked around the room, then resumed. The mysterious if unmistakable voice sang out a second time. Prange quieted, and so did the song. With the next encore, he trailed the voice to its lair, liberated Bing, and dragged him to the principal’s office. ² It was typical of Bing, a classmate noted, to turn a prank played on him into a more inventive prank of his own. ³

Gonzaga’s history was well known to the community. ⁴ In the autumn of 1865, Father Joseph M. Cataldo, a Jesuit missionary from Sicily, entered the Inland Empire, traveling on horseback to Couer d’Alene Mission. Within a year he had built a chapel at Peone Prairie, winning the confidence of the Spokane Indians. Under his leadership, a Catholic orphanage and the Sacred Heart Hospital were constructed. In 1881 he began to build a school for Indians on 320 acres of land just north of the Spokane River, purchased for 936 silver dollars from the Northern Pacific Railroad. Coolie labor made bricks from clay on the riverbank where four decades later the McGoldrick Lumber Company appeared. After six years of delays, Gonzaga College —named for the family of Saint Aloysius, patron saint of youth —opened its doors. But by that time Cataldo’s intentions were undermined by white settlers, who needed schooling for their own children. They insisted that the two-story building with basement and dormitory attic serve them exclusively. Seven boys, ages eleven to seventeen, arrived the first week, greeted by an eight-man faculty —four priests and four scholastics. By 1900 two more buildings had been added to accommodate increased enrollment and a high-school curriculum. A law school followed in 1912, changing Gonzaga’s standing to that of a university.

Jesuit pedagogy in America focused on educating the middle class, extending the liberalism of the Greeks in the cultivation of grammar, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, in addition to science. “The right word is a sure sign of good thinking,” the Athenian Isocrates instructed. ⁵ Writer Michael Harrington, a self-described “pious apostate,” once remarked of his own Jesuit education, “Our knowledge was not free floating; it was always consciously related to ethical and religious values.” ⁶

Bing’s devout mother underscored the moral imperatives encouraged during his eight years at Gonzaga. But the stern principles affirmed by her hairbrush were more unforgiving than the liberal inquiries of the Jesuits. Bing drew on both in creating the character of Father O’Malley (Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s), a paradigm of scholastic progressiveness. Privately, however, he was obliged to bargain his way out of a hellfire that was no more metaphorical to him than a golf club. His inclinations toward wildness could be indulged only in the context of an Augustinian postponement. ⁷ Bing would have understood Flannery O’Connor’s injunction “Good is something under construction.” ⁸ That part of him remained secret and unknowable, rehearsed only in the Sunday masses he attended without fail all his life.

In a 1950s radio interview with Father Caffrey, a genial radio priest, Bing recalled in typically breathless style (substituting conjunctions for punctuation) the “wonderful men at Gonzaga in those days.”

The university was only twenty-five or thirty-five years old then and there was still some of the pioneer staff of the Jesuit order, men around seventy-five or eighty years of age who had come out there in the Indian missions, as Father Cataldo and some of his followers had done, and they were brilliant men, men with great background in the missionary field, and I was much impressed with them, of course, because they had many stories to tell, incidents that happened in the first settlements, working with the Indians, and I was much impressed with their piety. I get a great deal of consolation from my religion, Father, and I think it was firmly embedded in me somehow back there at Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University by the good Fathers. ⁹

In his memoir, he credited the priests, whom he invariably describes as powerful and manly, with imparting to him “virility and devoutness, mixed with the habit of facing whatever fate set in my path, squarely, with a cold blue eye.’” ¹⁰ The cold blue eye was in his case genetic, the devotion inculcated, the fortitude willed.

Bing encountered one of the most formidable of those men on his first day, when he and a couple of friends went to register. Father James “Big Jim” Kennelly was a looming but beloved figure, pale-eyed and slope-shouldered, standing six foot three and weighing nearly 300 pounds, garbed in a floor-length black cassock fixed at the waist by a lengthy chain weighted with a ring of keys. As prefect of discipline since 1899, Big Jim was known for flicking his key ring at the bottoms of miscreants with, in Bing’s observation, “the accuracy and speed of a professional fly-caster.” ¹¹ He was no sadist, Bing quickly added, just a conscientious disciplinarian who was always willing to tuck his cassock into his pants and join the boys on the playing field. Bing may have presumed too much on Kennelly’s reputation as a “rah-rah” man and erstwhile star athlete. ¹² Asked about his desire to study, Bing allegedly told him, “Yeah, and play some football,” escaping the key ring by inches. ¹³

With his nearly photographic memory, Bing found that most subjects came reasonably easily. Leo Lynn, Bing’s factotum (stand-in, driver) for more than forty years, was a fellow student at Gonzaga and admired his sharpness and style. Bing could “rattle off Latin, was terrible at mathematics, good at Greek and history,” he recalled. ¹⁴ Despite difficulties in algebra (one semester he wrote an essay called “Why Algebra and Geometry Are Unnecessary in the Modern High School Curriculum”), Bing seemed bound for a conscientious academic career. He received distinctions in history, English, and Christian doctrine and was elected sergeant-at-arms (Frank Corkery was elected vice president) in his first year. With his instantly appreciated sonorous voice, he was chosen to read aloud an original composition to the freshman class. He faced thirty boys in uniform white blouses without a trace of nerves. Come spring, he was one of the fifty students competing in the annual high-school elocution assembly, and one of only fourteen chosen for “public exhibition.” He read “Old Watermelon Time.”

At Gonzaga’s neighboring church, St. Aloysius, Bing put his Latin to use as an altar boy, attending service daily at 6:30 in the morning every third week throughout his four years of high school. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum (To God who gives joy to my youth) was forever imprinted in his memory. “I served mass all over Spokane when I was up there,” he said. He served in later years as well, at least twice on transatlantic liners, assisting shipboard priests. “Of course,” he observed of those experiences, “I had to use the book. I couldn’t remember all the responses, but I guess I got by all right.” ¹⁵

Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education. It grounded his values and expectations, reinforcing his confidence and buffering him from his own ambition. As faithful as he was to show business, his demeanor was marked by a serenity that suggested an appealing indifference. He had something going for him that could not be touched by Hollywood envy and mendacity. He acted in the early years of his career as if he didn’t give a damn, displaying an irresponsibility that would have ensured a less talented man’s failure, and he learned to turn that knowing calm into a selling point. Other performers worked on the surface, but Bing kept as much in reserve as he revealed. He was as cool in life as he was in song or onscreen. He was the kind of man who, notified by phone the day after New Year’s 1943 that his family was safe but his home had burned to cinders, deadpanned, “Were they able to save my tux?” The Jesuits trained him to weigh the rewards of this world versus those of the next and to keep his own counsel. His brother Bob once said, “As an actor he played Bing Crosby, ‘cause he went to Jesuit school all his life. He knew the Jebbies pretty well.” ¹⁶

Bing himself was willing to give them much of the credit. Classes in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only to enunciate a lyric but to analyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase eloquentia perfecta (perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well. However casual a student Bing may have been — however much an underachiever, in the opinion of some teachers — he maintained better than average grades until his last year of pre-law, sustaining a consistent B/B+ average and taking several honors. “We had a lot of experience in public speaking and debating societies, standing on your feet and talking, and doing plays,” he emphasized, “and if I have ability as an actor, that’s where I got it.” ¹⁷

The Crosbys placed great stock in education, less in graduation. Harry Lowe dropped out of school, and so would most of his sons. (Catherine and Mary Rose attended Holy Names Academy, the neighboring convent school, and North Central High, but like most women in working-class families were not expected to attend college.) Yet Kate and Harry labored hard to keep the boys in school as long as possible. When Everett left to take a job, Kate’s disappointment was relieved only by the idea that his salary would help the younger boys graduate.

Larry, the oldest, did graduate. He described the family’s “common traits” as “natural conservatism, civic and patriotic interests, and devotion to education and learning, even at a time in our early history when such attainments were not common.” ¹⁸ He proceeded to tally history’s most learned Crosbys, without explaining how or if they figured in the direct family line: surgeons, jurists, scholars, writers, reformers, soldiers, and politicians, among them William George Crosby, a legislator in Maine after the Civil War; Howard Crosby, a reformer, clergyman, and writer, and his son Ernest, a prolific if marginal poet; and Cornelia Thurza Crosby, a trout fisherwoman called Fly Rod Crosby, after she outraged an assembly of sportsmen at Madison Square Garden by showing up in a green skirt “seven inches above the floor.” ¹⁹ Most significant from a musical angle was Frances (Fanny) Jane Crosby, the blind poet and hymn writer, who died in New York City in 1915 at ninety-five, credited with 8,000 hymns, including “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “There’s Music in the Air,” and a lyric to “Dixie” with which she attempted to turn that anthem into a Northern rallying cry, called “On! Ye Patriots to the Battle.”

On Good Friday 1917 President Wilson read his proclamation of war, and Gonzaga, like most campuses, hummed with patriotic commotion. The exodus of young men began in early June. Larry and Everett, gone from school by then, were instantly caught up in the fever. Larry quit his job as a clerk for New York Life Insurance and applied to officers’ training camp at the Presidio, leaving straightaway for San Francisco. Everett, who had left his job as assistant auditor at the Davenport Hotel to pursue greener prospects in Montana, wrote home that he had enlisted in the field artillery. (“I never rode a horse before in my life but I tried not to let the officers know it.”) ²⁰ Ted, a year below draft age, went to college, where he spent much of his time writing spy stories set in shady European capitals.

The older boys were away more than two years. Larry served as second lieutenant and commanded the Forty-fourth Company of the depot brigade at Camp Funston, Kansas; after the armistice, he was made camp insurance officer. Ev, a sergeant in the American Expeditionary Forces, was sent from Douglas, Arizona (where he boasted that he won a football game for the Eleventh Division Field Artillery), to St. Aignan. After he was decommissioned, he savored Gay Paree for two years, working part of the time as an American guide, living the high life, mastering French. Kate had hoped the conquering heroes would help pay for the younger boys’ schooling and shared her hope that either Ted or Bing would join the priesthood, a future Bing claimed to have contemplated.

An event that occurred when he was a teenager of fourteen made it clear that Bing was probably not destined for the clergy. He had taken a summer job as a property boy at Spokane’s prize theater, the Auditorium, and saw some of the finest acts and revues of the day. ²¹ On the evenings of June 19 and 20, Bing watched backstage as Al Jolson played his standard character, Gus, in Robinson Crusoe Jr. It was a role he had created a few years earlier: the canny black servant — in this farce, a chauffeur doubling as Friday — who always saves the day. A whirlwind comedian, Jolson raced around the stage ad-libbing lines and business, even song lyrics. During the show’s fifteen-month tour, he was billed for the first time as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer.”

Bing was spellbound by the electrifying blackface performer. Jolson brought the house down with his spoof of Hawaiian songs “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula” and the lunatic “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” (cowritten by the same team that wrote Bing’s early signature song ten years later, “In a Little Spanish Town”). ²² Bing and his friends knew and admired Jolson’s recordings, but neither records nor all the live vaudeville he soaked up on weekend evenings prepared him for the man’s galvanizing energy. “I hung on every word and watched every move he made,” he recalled. “To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived.” ²³ At fourteen, Bing began to imagine himself before the footlights; he kept those dreams to himself.

Harry’s fortunes had wavered uncertainly for two years, but at long last Inland Brewery’s stockholders “concluded to accept present conditions as to prohibition” and changed the corporate name to Inland Products Company. ²⁴ They authorized the expenditure of $175,000 to erect a modern cold-storage warehouse and convert the brewery into a vinegar factory. Reincorporated in 1917, the firm elected four officers: the three original partners and H. L. Crosby, secretary, whose duties also included selling merchandise from a new retail shop that stocked pickles, sugared cider, ice, candy, ketchup, ice cream, soda water, and near beer. ²⁵ It promoted itself as the “Home of 22 Varieties.” Pickles assumed particular prominence after Inland contracted with a distributor that supplied New York’s Lower East Side Orthodox Jewish community. A Spokane rabbi regularly visited the plant to certify its pickles as kosher.

Harry would coast reasonably well until 1923, when senior partner Charles Theis appointed his son secretary and laid off Harry, bringing him back as shipping clerk. A man whose father worked as foreman of the plant recalled that as a boy he and his friends visited the shop to buy soda and candy. Mr. Crosby would come out of the back office and wait on them: “A very pleasant fellow, very pleasant. Medium build and, well, he wasn’t a handsome guy, but he was a nice-looking fellow. He had a very good personality and everybody liked him.” ²⁶

Harry’s own boys were ambivalent; they knew very well who controlled the Crosby house. “She was a matriarch,” Bob said of Kate, adding, “we were shanty Irish,” to explain the tradition. ²⁷ Kate was strict and hard, though not the terror she became in later years, when Bing’s office workers doused their cigarettes and smoothed their skirts because they heard she was in the building. When Bing was young, Kate was the powerful center of his life. Her will ultimately helped drive him from Spokane, but he left with an armor of independence and raw nerve. Kate alone could always threaten his equilibrium. Until she died, her sudden appearance in a room would prompt him to put aside his drink and snuff his cigarette. Peggy Lee recalled a party at the Crosbys’ when she and Bing were conversing near the piano. As Mrs. Crosby walked in, Bing maneuvered his glass behind some picture frames. ²⁸

Asked, as he often was, if he attributed his success to any particular factor, Bing usually answered: “I think my mother’s prayers. She’s always been a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer and since I was a little boy, she prayed for all of us daily, and had masses said for us and rosaries, and the nuns up in our parish, the Poor Clares, they’re a cloistered order — they don’t ever get out of the monastery — she would bring them meals and take their laundry out and do all kinds of things, and they always prayed for me and for the family, for our health and our well-being, both spiritual and physical…. If I’ve been lucky, and I certainly have been inordinately lucky, why I think you have to attribute it to the efficacy of prayer.” ²⁹ When Bing was not honoring his mother’s probity, he would issue credit for his success to producers, managers, and associates, claiming for himself only the good sense to take their advice. If Kate had sent him on his way with a ready supply of confidence, she also instilled in him the old Irish commandment to keep his head down.

Harry’s finances intensified the need for his kids to earn money on their own. “Dependability was a necessity in our house with seven youngsters around and a happy life only possible if everyone followed an established pattern of family routine,” Kate later explained. “The older ones,” she continued, “had to help with the younger ones and they had to try not to be an expense on the family purse. When their clothes and their parties became an item, they had to seek methods of earning their way a little to help out.” Bing had no trouble with this. Kate once overheard him tell a friend, “I like a jingle in my pocket that’s my very own.” ³⁰

Bing probably worked as many jobs as the rest of the Crosby children combined — in addition to his household chores, which included, at various times, keeping the woodbox full, scrubbing floors, mowing the lawn, and raising chickens in the yard. He was always on the go — early to bed and early to rise, making the most of every waking moment. He was available to milk cows, run errands, and mow lawns. In harvesting season he raced out with other kids to “thin” the apple orchards. Not that he needed authorization to harvest. His friend Benny Ruehl remembered Bing and the other boys stealing cherries from trees in his front yard. “My mother squirted the boys with a garden hose to get them out of the trees.” ³¹ Ruehl also recalled the time one boy successfully dared Bing to bellyflop into a mud puddle, while Harry stood by and laughed. Harry could not help but admire Bing’s resourcefulness. His high-school jobs during summer and holidays included — in addition to lifeguard and caddy —postal worker, boxing usher, grocery-truck driver, woodchopper at a resort, and topographer at a lumber camp.

And he still came up short. Delbert Stickney, whose family lived down the street, often went to the movies with Bing. Delbert’s mother worked in a department store downtown, and the boys regularly stopped by her counter to bum change for the show. When he visited the Stickney home, Bing would sit in the parlor, singing and pecking a song on the piano with one finger while cradling Delbert’s baby niece Shirley on his lap. In 1948 Shirley’s daughter suffered an attack of polio and could not afford treatments. Hearing that Bing was stopping in Spokane, Mrs. Stickney went to his hotel and asked for a loan. “No, I won’t loan it to you,” he told her, “but I’ll give it to you. All the quarters Delbert and I borrowed from you including interest must be close to that amount.” ³²

For a boy characterized as lackadaisical, Bing had a peculiar affinity for early-morning jobs he could keep throughout the school year. As delivery boy for the Spokesman-Review, he rose at four to collect the papers. His whistling and singing carried far in the quiet Spokane mornings as he pedaled his bike from house to house. Occasionally a neighbor raised a window and warned him to keep it down. In 1938 he wrote Charles Devlin of the paper’s promotional department, “I hope all my boys may start as carriers. I want them to be workers.” ³³ All his brothers had routes, he noted, and the girls filled in when the boys were sick. “Of the bunch, I probably developed the least desire for labor… but the whistling experience came in mighty handy.” ³⁴

No amount of work could compromise Bing’s belief that he was by nature lazy. If indolence was part of the professional Crosby charm, it figured privately as a source of penitence. As Seneca wrote and Bing learned to recite in Latin, “Nothing is so certain as that the evils of idleness can be shaken off by hard work.” The habit of rising early came naturally to him. He roused himself on cold winter mornings when it was dark and warmed his hands over an oil drum, waiting for the papers. After delivering them, he had breakfast at home, served mass (if it was the third week of the month), and attended school. One of Kate’s friends told Bing about an open position for morning janitor at the Everyman’s Club on Front Avenue, a flophouse for transient miners and loggers in the heart of skid row. Bing applied for the job and was hired. For a buck a day that winter, he layered himself in wool clothing and after delivering his papers took a streetcar across the river into downtown Spokane, arriving at five. For the next hour, he tidied the facility, maneuvering around the drunks and layabouts, learning about canned heat (which, liquefied into its alcoholic content, caused blindness and madness) and powdered tobacco and other comforts of the lower depths. He was back home for breakfast by seven, except on days he had 6:30 mass.

Kate proudly described him as “prompt, methodical, sticks to his plans and sticks to his word.” ³⁵ She bristled at the notion, promulgated chiefly by Bing himself, that he was idle. “My children were brought up to do for themselves and from the oldest to the youngest they still do. Anyone who works with Bing, for instance, knows he rarely sends or asks for things. He just quietly goes and gets it for himself.” ³⁶ Later, in Hollywood, he was known for his entourage of one, Gonzaga classmate Leo Lynn. A butler whom Bing hired in his most baronial years — at the insistence of his second wife — mistakenly assumed Crosby didn’t like him, as he wasn’t permitted to pack or carry his employer’s suitcase or open his car door or fuss over him at all. ³⁷

“He had a vocabulary like a senator’s,” Bing’s father once said, “and we used to call him Travis McGutney.” ³⁸ His way with words, not just his singing and whistling, helped define Bing’s personality for his friends. He rolled large words on his tongue, trilled rs, fiddled with malapropisms and spoonerisms, and mimicked the lower, upper, and outcast classes, exemplified in minstrel badinage or highfalutin rhetoric. This talent gave him distinction within his gang. Interviewed in the 1940s, childhood friends and neighbors said they thought him more likely to become a comedian than a singer. One pal said he hardly recognized the Bing he knew in the movies until he began making the Road pictures with Bob Hope. All that easy banter with Hope, the double takes and primed reactions, the fast wit and easy superiority — that was the way he was in school. His romantic pictures of the 1930s, on the other hand, weren’t Bing at all, a friend said; he had never showed that much interest in girls.

The only early crush he spoke of was inspired by one Gladys Lemmon, who survived in the Crosby mythology less for her curly-haired charms than her pun-inspiring name. Upon hearing that Bing carried her books and took her sledding, Larry taunted him at the dinner table as a lemon-squeezer, prompting Bing to hurl a slice of buttered bread that in later accounts metamorphosed into a leg of lamb. The courtship allegedly ended when Bing was forced to wear a starched priestlike collar that made his neck chafe to Gladys’s birthday party. It was not his only social faux pas. Margaret Nixon would not invite him to her birthdays because he once stole the party ice cream from her back porch. He was that kind of boy, she said. And Vera Lemley complained that after she broke a date with him, Bing would not talk to her for two years.

If his glib lingo failed to serve Bing as a gallant, it did enhance his standing at Gonzaga High. In his sophomore year he was cited as Next in Merit in elocution (Frank Corkery, who put no less faith in language, won the gold medal) and took first honors in English. Bing’s popularity and sportsmanship were affirmed early in the semester: he was elected class consultor and captained the victorious Dreadnoughts in the Junior Yard Association Midget Football League. He also made the JYA baseball team. Posing in his striped red-and-white uniform, he was small, chubby, beaming. Those endeavors proved less meaningful than his admission to the Junior Debating Society, which increased his presence in public-speaking events, though he proved better at elocution than debate. The university magazine, Gonzaga, reviewed a recital of Poe’s “The Bells” by Bing, Corkery, and two others as “striking and novel,” the high point of a contest in public speaking. ³⁹ Bing recited “Romancin’” to a packed house at St. Aloysius Hall and took the adverse position in a debate about limiting the American presidency to a single term of six years.

In 1919, through the efforts of Father Kennelly, football was restored as a major activity at Gonzaga. Its triumphant team produced two players inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. One was Ray Flaherty (“big and powerful — watch out for Flaherty,” Gonzaga prophesied), with whom Bing remained friendly all his life. Flaherty led the NFL in pass receptions in 1932, helped the New York Giants to the NFL championship in 1934, and retired as coach with the highest winning percentage (.735) in the annals of the Washington Redskins. Ray and Bing were on the Midget team together, and Ray admired his moxie, though he did not think much of him as a footballer. ⁴⁰ Still, Bing’s fortitude was noted after he trimmed down to 135 pounds and learned to handle himself adequately as center. Of a JYA game against Hillyard High (a tie: 19-19), Gonzaga reported, “B. Crosby was a tower of strength on defense.” ⁴¹

Flaherty conceded that Bing was “pretty good” at baseball. “We played on the Ideal Laundry team in the commercial or business league. We’d play at Mission Park, five blocks up the street from Gonzaga. Oh, we were best of friends, used to chum around all the time, wrestled, played handball, though he didn’t play too much handball. Bing was more into entertainment in the evening. He was always a happy kid and was always singing a song. Even though he was a little kid, he was singing. He just was full of music and he was a great whistler. He could really whistle. They used to have these smokers where they’d have kids that liked to box and they’d get a pretty good student body and some outsiders. Bing used to sing at those. He didn’t box, I don’t think, but he sang and that brought some people in, too. Hell, he could sing like nobody else, sing and whistle. He had a hell of a whistle.” ⁴²

In addition to winning reelection as class consultor in his junior year, Bing was voted Junior Yard Association secretary-treasurer following “a stormy session and a bit of political logrolling.” ⁴³ Bing racked up distinctions in English, history, elocution, theology, Latin, and civics and prevailed in reading competitions, scoring coups with “The Dukite Snake” and Macauley’s poem of Horatius at the Bridge. “I took those eloquent lines in my teeth and shook them as a terrier shakes a bone,” he wrote. ⁴⁴ Bing, Corkery, and Flaherty enlisted together as charter members of Gonzaga’s new glee club. In the club’s annual photograph, Bing sports a high pompadour and a roomy jacket. For their first grand concert in St. Aloysius Hall, Bing did not participate in musical numbers but read three selections during intermission.

He fared less well in debate; as part of a two-man team that lost two decisions, he argued against abolishing immigration and forcing Woodrow Wilson’s resignation due to illness. Bing, who always took the liberal side, was demoted to an alternate in his senior year. His role in the public debate that year (concerning the League of Nations) was to deliver a recitation at intermission. ⁴⁵ He had reason to regard his education as Augustine did his own: “Their one aim was that I should learn how to make a good speech and become an orator capable of swaying his audience,” the Bishop of Hippo wrote. ⁴⁶

Bing looked back with mocking amusement at the rival clubs organized by the most avid speakers and debaters. He founded the Bolsheviks in loyal opposition to the Dirty Six, who commandeered perks such as patrolling varsity sporting events. The “rival tongs,” as Bing called them, indulged in free-for-all political debate. ⁴⁷ Inevitably, a priest — Father O’Brien, a Brit — reproached Bing’s clique for embracing a name associated with godlessness. “Apparently his devoutness and his English sense of humor had him confused, for he said we’d be ‘cleansed’ if we stopped using the name,” Bing wrote. ⁴⁸ Bing also joined the Derby Club, an offshoot of the Bolsheviks, which consisted of six or eight “blades” who sported derbies in class.

Recitation led to other theatrical projects. Gonzaga looked upon theater not merely as a high-school drama-club option but as an undertaking essential to a model Jesuit education. Writing in the university yearbook, instructor William DePuis traced “love of the dramatic” to a pagan worship of Bacchus, which the church adapted to its own ends: “The Mystery and Miracle play taught the sacred story of Christ and the saints. The religious idea yielded gradually to the popular desire for amusement, and the holy day became the holiday.” ⁴⁹ That notion would be employed as a motif in Bing’s Father O’Malley films.

Bing enjoyed two genuine theatrical triumphs in his senior year, yet the production that became fixed in Crosby lore was a junior English class presentation of Julius Caesar — a prize example of hapless mythmaking. In the February 1919 performance, promoted in the Spokane Daily Chroniclewith a photo and cast listing, Bing played Second Citizen. His friend Ed “Pinky” Gowanlock played Caesar. According to witnesses interviewed three decades later, the most memorable moment followed Caesar’s death, as the rolled-up curtain sprang from its hinges and nearly flattened Pinky. Over time, however, Bing became the center of everyone’s memories. According to Ted and Larry, he played Marc Antony and dodged the curtain; according to Everett, he played Caesar and dodged the curtain. According to Bing, in 1946, he played a fallen soldier who dodged the curtain and was rewarded with howls of laughter, for which he took many bows. In 1976 he said that he played a fallen soldier who calmly walked off after the curtain fell. If one accepts Pinky’s account, he might well have invoked Plautus’s lament Ut saepe summa ingenia in occulto latent (How often the greatest talents are shrouded in obscurity). Bing did remark in 1957, when he presented the school with a new library, “In show business, we like to take our bows, even when we can steal them.” ⁵⁰

Forgotten entirely or at least unmentioned was the Antony Bing played ten months later at the annual Gonzaga Night revelry that preceded the December break. Though it surely stretched Gonzaga’s notion of creditable theater, Bing, Corkery, and a few friends offered a minstrel burlesque of Shakespeare, depicting Caesar as a “dark-skinned bone artist.” ⁵¹ Their performance, a Bolshevik send-up of the Dirty Sixers who appeared in Pinky’s version, marked Bing’s second venture into burnt cork. Blackface was then too much a show-business convention to elicit accusations of racism. A year earlier the Spokane County Council of Defense put the First Amendment on hold to pass a resolution banning The Birth of a Nation; the same community had no qualms concerning traveling minstrel troupes and would have felt cheated had Al Jolson shown up at the Auditorium in paleface.

In the spring the drama and glee clubs presented an Irish playlet, The Curate of Kilronan, at St. Aloysius, a production paced with several Irish songs. Once again Bing did not sing, but his acting earned him a notice in the school magazine: he and another student had “used well their experience on the stage and acquitted themselves in fine style as true friends of the unfortunate curate.” ⁵² Bing and his brother Ted were feted afterward at a cast banquet at the Spokane Hotel.

While Bing was charming his way through school, exhibiting less ambition than verve, displaying varied talents that never quite came into focus, Ted nursed his desire to write and worked at it like a professional. Ted was one of Gonzaga’s most enterprising and prolific contributors, and in his senior year he edited the alumni section. During the summer he interned at the Spokane Evening Chronicle, where Larry worked after the war. But everything seemed to fall into Bing’s lap, not least the devotion of their mother and a stable of friends. An occasional truant, Bing was all too familiar with the Jug, a room where unruly students atoned by memorizing the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Caesar — backward, if the offense was serious. ⁵³ Ted, on the other hand, was as steady as they come. Yet even the priests preferred Bing, perhaps because they were gung-ho on sports, and Ted was the only Crosby boy who ducked athletics. Bing sparkled and Ted plodded.

Ted was taller than Bing, his coloring similar — blue eyes, a darker shade of brown hair. A keen reader, he kept to himself, inventing a fantasy life and exploring it in a profusion of short stories, poems, and essays. Bing ended up living much of what Ted imagined. Ted would raise a family in Spokane, where for most of his life he worked at the Washington Water Power Company. In his one book, The Story of Bing Crosby, published in 1946, he depicts himself in childhood as a would-be inventor, disowning entirely the years he put into his writing. Yet unlike that frivolous and highly fictionalized account, some of his early stories suggest a darker view of his rivalry with Bing.

Ted’s “When Black Is White,” for example, published in Gonzaga a couple of months before Bing graduated from high school, establishes as its villain Dr. Howard Croye, “a gifted speaker,” very popular, and “deeply interested in church work.” “Aristocratic in habits and faultless in attire,” he charms a millionaire mining magnate into financing his construction of a sanatorium. Howard absconds with the money, eventually returning to the sanatorium to die an agonizing death. In contrast, the dependable center of the story is a journalist, Jim (Ted’s middle name was John), who uncovers the deception and brings salvation to the children of Howard and the philanthropist he destroyed. ⁵⁴

The month Bing graduated, Gonzaga published his sole offering, a poem in celebration of wealth, renown, exotic climes, and dreamy languor. It stood out in stark contrast to Ted’s odes to fallen heroes, God, Gonzaga, duty, Crosby seafarers, Lincoln, the Northwest and to those of every other Gonzaga poet, who invariably evoked patriotism, mother, and God.

A King.

While lying on my couch one night

I dreamed a dream of wondrous light.

I thought I was an ancient king

Of the Mystic East — I heard them sing

My praises high in accents grand,

While cymbals echoed loud — and

As I sat in robes of white

With vassals kneeling left and right,

Strong, dusky slaves from Hindustan

Alighting from the caravan

Upon their heads and in their arms

Bore spice and all the Orient’s charms,

While flowed the music soft and sweet

They piled them high about my feet.

But I was snatched from this away In rudeness by the dawn of day.

— Harry L. Crosby, H.S. ’20 ⁵⁵

Some believe that only those who admit to themselves that they crave wealth and prestige can obtain them. Only in “A King,” a thin, dashed-off indulgence consigned to a volume of juvenilia, did Bing ever come close to acknowledging his ambitions, at least in public. All his life — on radio, in films, press releases, magazines, and interviews — Bing portrayed himself and was portrayed by others as an unambitious man to whom splendid things happened, deservedly, without his ever really chasing fortune. Bing’s ambivalence about worldly success was made manifest in the early stages of his career, when he did everything possible to sabotage himself. It was as if success were acceptable only as a gift, unexpected and unsought. Despite his hard work and desperate longing, he never publicly allowed that he merited his special fate.

Fifty-two students received diplomas from Gonzaga on June 9, 1920, the largest graduating class that the high school had ever produced. Students had a choice of pursuing a diploma in a general or classical course, and Bing received his in the latter. Nearly a month before, the class and faculty had celebrated with a picnic and sporting events at Liberty Lake, eighteen miles east, where the graduates rented canoes and swam in the recently opened pool. On June 7 the Spokane Daily Chronicle announced the list of those who would speak at graduation, among them two representatives of the student body, Frank Corkery and Bing. In an accompanying photograph, Bing sports a necktie (as do the others) but looks drowsy and exhibits not a trace of the slight smiles the others share.

Graduation exercises took place on a Wednesday afternoon in the gym, and after the Gonzaga orchestra played the overture, “Columbia,” Harry L. Crosby was introduced as the first speaker. His speech was “The Purpose of Education,” a text that has not survived. Corkery delivered the valedictory. Bing was not awarded class honors, so his prominent role in the ceremony must be construed as an acknowledgment of his elocutionary and speech-making skills. Among other speakers was the Reverend Charles E. Carroll, S.J., prefect of studies, who became dean of the faculty in 1922 and overseer of the Bing Crosby Library in 1957.

Bing had slimmed down in the past year — the chubby, grinning boy of his freshman pictures was now lanky and serious, his face longer and leaner, his voice deeper and more controlled. But he was a year younger than his classmates and looked it. A downtown dance hall refused him admission one evening, sending him away in humiliation. For all his singing, Bing had not yet fixed his star on music, though a friend later recalled his listening to a Jolson record and marveling aloud that by singing a couple of songs Al earned enough money to buy a car.

His taste in music began to lean toward jazz, an almost unavoidable partiality given the raging popularity in 1917 of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a second-rate ensemble that had the distinction of making the earliest jazz records. A white band from New Orleans, the ODJB created a sensation in New York with novel, noisy, and irreverent music, including instrumental barnyard imitations on “Livery Stable Blues.” Its fans included black songwriter Shelton Brooks, whose “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” was the ODJB’s first record. (Columbia Records, offended by the loud, poorly engineered performance, shelved it until Victor picked up the ball and produced a series of ODJB hits.)

By 1923 many superior black bands were recording and performing for mixed northern audiences, diminishing the ODJB’s status to that of a jazz popularizer. But in the interim, countless bands throughout the country followed the ODJB’s lead, blending the rudiments of ragtime, jazz, blues, marches, vaudeville, dance music, and popular songs, and young people devoured their recordings.

Among the performers Bing and his friends recalled listening to —in addition to Jolson, John McCormack, and other singers — were Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone choir (soprano on the high end, bass on the bottom) popular on the vaudeville circuit and through such buoyant recordings as “That Moaning Saxophone Rag” and its own version of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” as well as adaptations of arias, and Art Hickman, the pioneering San Francisco-based bandleader who composed the standard “Rose Room” and codified big band or dance band instrumentation — in effect, setting the stage for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. They listened to Hawaiian bands with steel guitars and comedy records, like Joe Hayman’s million-selling “Cohen on the Telephone,” and everything else that came through town. Every new record was a mystery until it was played.

In the summer of 1920, with the rigors of Gonzaga University approaching, Bing felt a need to escape Spokane. He was bored with excursions to Newman and Liberty Lakes, where small bands played at dances; he had had enough caddying and swimming for a while. He wanted to see something of the world and break loose even for a short time from the house on East Sharp. After the war Larry returned home, teaching high school while working nights and summers at the newspaper. Everett rushed through Spokane like a storm, traveling on to Portland, where he claimed to be clerking in a hotel.

Bing and his friend Paul Teters resolved to leave town for a couple of months. A want ad in the paper alerted them to a job for two men to work on an alfalfa farm in Cheney, Washington, half an hour away by train, for two bucks a day and board. After securing permission from their parents, they left in the morning and presented themselves for work. The alfalfa farmer was underwhelmed — they were young and inexperienced — and he offered them a dollar each. They grudgingly accepted.

Two decades later Bing bought an 8,700-acre cattle ranch in Elko, Nevada, and insisted that his sons do haying and other exhausting tasks along with the paid cowhands. Gary, the eldest, bridled at the drudgery and years later smiled knowingly upon learning that his father had been no more enamored of farming than Gary had been of ranching. After two weeks of milking cows and putting up alfalfa for forage, Bing and Paul decided to quit. Returning home was out of the question. Luckily, though, Everett Crosby was in Portland, 400 miles west, and he would certainly put them up and maybe find them work. The boys hiked to a water tower where the evening freight train stopped to replenish, and under cover of darkness stole a ride.

They were dusty and rank by the time they pulled into Portland and rushed to the hotel where Everett clerked, only to find out that he did not work there. They were asked to remove their scruffy selves from the lobby. Confused but emboldened, the boys turned their sights on Los Angeles, hopping a southbound Shasta Limited. They got as far as Roseburg, where a railroad bull collared them and put them in a cattle car heading back to Portland. This time they ran into Everett on the street, toting two wicker suitcases full of bootleg hooch. He told them to meet him later at the Shaw Hotel and gave them a dollar for a movie. After the picture show, the hungry boys looked down the street and saw a sign advertising a second-story Chinese restaurant. They split a dish of chop suey and, after Bing diverted the owner by shoving menus off the front counter, raced down the stairs without paying. An alert policeman tracked them to Everett’s room and arrested them. Everett paid the lunch bill, and they were released with the magistrate’s warning to leave town.

Bing wrote to Kate and told her not to worry, knowing she would worry less about yet another of his minor scrapes than the possibility that he might not want to return to school in September. Kate’s brother George met the boys in Portland and took them to the West-dale mills, where they boarded a logging train to a camp Bing’s cousin Lloyd operated for Weyerhaeuser Lumber. Jobs were offered: Paul chose to return home while Bing signed on as a topographer scouting trails. Somehow he gashed his knee with an axe — in one retelling, he said he gashed both knees in consecutive accidents. He clearly wanted out of that forest, even in memory. Gonzaga University now promised relief, like mass after a morning at the Everyman’s Club.