Bing Crosby (8 page)

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-Review
crowed, “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.