by Gary Giddins
20. The Harrigan children were William John Harrigan (1867), Alexander Ambrose (1869), Edward (1870), Catherine (1873), Anne (1875), Francis Albert (1876), and George Leo (1879).
21. This was her accepted family name, but there is no Helen on her Stillwater birth certificate.
22. Lucky, p. 52.
23. The dry-goods store run by Albert H. Sanford and George H. Stone sold fabrics, clothing, and hardware. It was across the street from the library at 1115-17 Tacoma Avenue and is listed as Kate’s place of employment in the 1893-94 city directory. AI, Judith Kipp.
2. The Crosbys
1. Blankenship, Early History of Thurston County, p. 267.
2. Ibid.
3. Crosby Genealogy. Larry Crosby’s privately printed chronicle was completed in 1960. Although he kept complete files on the genealogy in the Crosby offices, they were not available for research and may have disappeared. The Genealogy is not an infallible source: it has obvious mistakes (the date of Harry Lowe Crosby’s death is given as 1949, instead of 1950) and contradictions.
4. Ibid. Larry also claimed earlier English Crosbys: a Yorkshire constable in 1204; a property owner named Golfrides de Crosseby; and John de Crosseby, a procurator appointed by the abbot of St. John’s in Colchester early in the fourteenth century.
5. Bing refers to him as Edmund in Lucky, and other biographers name him Thomas, but William is the name in White’s Biographical Bulletin on Bing, 1946; in Larry’s genealogy; and in the rolls of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.
6. Institute of American Archives, certified by director Mendell Peterson.
7. Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper, edited by his grandson James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), p. 284.
8. Mary E. Phillips, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: John Lane Company, 1913), p. 86. For more on Enoch, see The Spy Unmasked, or Memoirs of Enoch Crosby, alias Harvey Birch, The Hero of Mr. Cooper’s Tale of the Neutral Ground,edited by H. L. Barnum in 1831. Also James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper(New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949).
9. Susan Feminore Cooper, “Small Family memories” (1883), in Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper, p. 42.
10. The name Nathaniel became a Crosby good-luck piece. Nathaniel Sr. begat Nathaniel Jr., who begat Desire Crosby (born 1772), Bethiah, and David from his first marriage, and from his second, Tabitha, Mary, and Captain Nathaniel Crosby I,who was born in 1782. Nat I married Ruby Foster, begetting in 1810 Captain Nathaniel Crosby II, and later married (in 1831) Mary Lincoln in Wiscasset, Maine, begetting another Nathaniel in 1835, as well as Mary Lincoln and Martha Ruby.
11. The passenger list for the Grecian included Captain Clanrick Crosby, his wife, Phebe F. Crosby, and their three children, Clanrick, Phebe Luisa, and Cecilia; First Officer Washington Hurd and his wife (Clanrick’s sister) and their two-year-old daughter, Ella; Second Officer Albert Crosby (Clanrick’s younger brother) and his wife; Mrs. Mary Crosby, wife of Captain Nathaniel Jr. and three children, Nathaniel,Mary, and Martha; Mrs. Holmes, companion-housekeeper; Captain Nathaniel Crosby Sr., the father of the captain and second officer; and one passenger, Mr. Converse Lilly of New York — all in the cabin. Forward, there were seven more, including the three brothers of Mrs. Nathaniel Crosby Jr: Joseph Taylor, Foster Lincoln, and Nathaniel Lincoln.
12. Martha married a ship chandler and remained in China until 1864, when she brought her son to San Francisco to escape a cholera epidemic. She resettled in Olympia, where her mother and siblings were. Her husband died of cholera in China, and she lived in Tumwater for the next two years, then married Andrew Burr, Capital City’s postmaster and a loquacious politician, and had three children.
13. Goldie Robertson Funk, “The Old Crosby Home at Tumwater,” Seattle Times, Mar. 20, 1949.
14. AI, KenTwiss.
15. Catherine Crosby, “A Mother’s Day,” unidentified magazine clip (c. 1947). BCCGU.
3. Tacoma
1. Burt McMurtrie, “It Seems to Me,” Tacoma Daily News, Sept. 29, 1948.
2. Most of the material on the treasurer’s office and Harry’s early employment is from an analysis of county records by Judith Kipp of the Tacoma Public Library, Northwest Room. Election results from Bonney’s History of Pierce County.
3. Tacoma Daily Ledger, Dec. 14, 1902. The deed was turned over by Alexander T. Hosmer to Catherine H. Crosby for $850 on January 6, 1903.
4. Tacoma Daily Ledger, May 4, 1903. “Summer arrived full blown in Tacoma yesterday,” the story began, “and the whole city was out taking the open air. The day was perfect, with twelve hours of warm, mellow sunshine and a gently stirring breeze, ideal weather for outdoor recreation.”
5. Tacoma Daily Ledger, May 5, 1903: “The home of Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby was gladdened yesterday by the arrival of a son.”
6. Tacoma Daily News, May 6, 1903.
7. Tacoma Daily Ledger, May 7, 1903: “A little son arrived May 3 in the home of Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby.”
8. Reverend Anthony LeBlanconce was parish priest and signed the register, which reads “Henrieum Lillis.”
9. Paul Vandervoort II, “Uncle Sam Sans Whiskers,” Band Leaders Magazine, Jan. 1946.
10. Intrepid researchers in the 1940s had little difficulty finding the truth —indeed, until the mid-eighties, the only book to get it right was Mize’s Bing Crosby and the Bing Crosby Style. The Associated Press Biographical Service had the correct year (wrong day) in a 1946 Crosby sketch but altered it to 1904 as of 1949, presumably acceding to pressure from the Crosby organization. In 1949 Bing’s business manager, Basil Grillo, noticed discrepancies regarding his age on several life-insurance policies: “Everyone of them had a different age, all the way from 1901 to 1904. When an insurance policy doesn’t state the right age, they adjust the payments accordingly when it comes time to pay off. So not understanding the actor’s mind, I innocently went to Bing and I said, ‘Bing, we’ve got a lot of policies here and they all have a different birth date for you, which really changes the amount of insurance we carry’ I asked, ‘When were you actually born?’ He says, ‘Nineteen hundred and four.’ Even for business reasons, he was born in 1904. Everything related back to his success as a movie actor. He tried to protect it, and I think the age thing was an outgrowth of that. He once told me, ‘In this business, youth is everything.’ Maybe he convinced himself that he was born in 1904. Who knows?” Grillo believed that Crosby was born in 1901, because Larry said so. Yet by 1957 no one in the family could have been in doubt. That year, in advance of his second marriage, Bing himself obtained a baptismal certificate with the correct date; shortly thereafter, Larry prepared the genealogy he distributed to the family, correctly identifying his brother’syear of birth. Yet 1901 and 1904 continue to crop up in reference works. AI, Basil Grillo.
11. Catherine Cordelia was the first of the Crosby children whose birth was recorded by Tacoma’s Department of Public Health.
12. AI, Ken Twiss, who spoke with Mary Rose and said she reluctantly conceded her role in the May 2/3 controversy.
13. Reed was replaced by his former cashier, Edgar M. Lakin, who succeeded Reed as treasurer in the election of 1904. At first, the change boded well for Crosby, who was soon advanced to the position of deputy. Yet for unknown reasons, he was fired before the end of 1905, possibly to reward an elusive clerk named William Turner, who with far less experience was given Harry’s job. His dismissal was followed by that of all the men promoted by Lakin. Only Turner returned to a demoted post in 1910.
14. For many years Tacoma’s port was larger than Seattle’s because it was thirty miles farther west and saved a day in transporting goods to the Pacific — a system known as “rail to sail.” Tacoma was shaped by a series of booms and busts that began in 1852, when the first sawmill was opened by a Swede who then bought a large tract of land, hoping the Northern Pacific Railroad would come through. The NPRR was given land to do just that, and the lumber companies followed.
15. Ted Crosby,
The Story ofBing Crosby, p. 20. This is the 1946 edition of a book originally published in 1937 and credited to Ted and Larry Crosby. (See Chapter 21.) In addition to being updated, the second version is revised in numerous small ways. Both are essentially fictions, however, and are referenced here with much caution.
16. Lucky, p. 56.
17. Ibid., p. 55.
18. Deed #230077, received Jan. 5, 1907.
19. Spokesman-Review, Sept. 13, 1908. BCCGU.
4. Spokane
1. Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz, “ The Collected Essays. Also Melville writes in Moby Dick (Chapter XLV) of the “rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name” bestowed by an admiring community.
2. Stratton, Spokane & the Inland Empire, p. xiv; Spokane city directory of 1914.
3. For some twenty years the NPRR treated the city as little more than a dependent, hindering its growth with monopolistic pricing so that Spokane’s businessmen lost out to rivals in Seattle, where competing railroads charged half as much to transport products from the East.
4. Motto engraved on a Northern Pacific Railway arch in Sept. 1883. See Stratton, Spokane & the Inland Empire, pp. 109—21 for a concise history of the NPRR’s impact on Spokane.
5. Ted and Larry, Bing, p. 6. This passage was deleted from the 1946 edition.
6. Lucky, p. 56.
7. NET-TV interview, Close-Up on Bing Crosby, 1967.
8. “Heiber Incorporates Brewery,” Spokesman-Review, Apr. 12, 1892; “Hieber Brewery Changes Hands,” Oct. 1, 1905; “Plan Beer Agency,” Apr. 15, 1906; “Erect New Ice Plant,” Nov. 16, 1906; and “Pays $35,000 for Lease,” Sept. 29, 1908. Also, Spokane city directories, 1906-34.
9. Ad, 1911 city directory.
10. “A Mother’s Day,” op. cit.
11. Harry L. Crosby Sr. as told to Jack Holland, “My Boy Bing,” Movies (undated, probably spring 1940). BCCGU.
12. “The Kid from Spokane,” Collier’s, Apr. 27, 1935.
13. The “Bingville Bugle” references are from the Spokesman-Review for March 13, 1910; August 7,1910; September 13, 1910; January 29, 1911;April2, 1911.
14. Despite references to a floppy-eared Bingo in Lucky, a 1949 Associated Press sketch, and elsewhere, a search of the “Bingville Bugle” for 1910 turned up no such character, though there was a drawing of an unnamed fellow with outsize ears.
15. “Uncle Sam Sans Whiskers,” op. cit.
16. Gertrude Kroetch, 1946 interview memo. TIA.
17. “A Mother’s Day,” op. cit.
18. They were Ted, Bob, Mary Rose, and Kay. AI, Howard Crosby.
19. Bing Crosby, “My Second Family,” from the early 1960s, reprinted in The Crosby Voice, Sept. 1984, Australia.
20. NET interview, op. cit.
21. “My Boy Bing” op. cit.
22. Lucky, p. 56.
23. Helen Finnegan, 1946 interview memo. TIA.
24. Lucky, p. 57.
25. In his book, Ted Crosby says Kate proudly refused the offer, but he told his son Howard that Kate was all for it and Harry stopped her. AI, Howard Crosby.
26. Radio interview with Jack O’Brien, New York, Dec. 10, 1976.
27. Wilbur W. Hindley, “In Clemmer and Liberty New Record Is Made by Spokane,” Spokesman-Review, Feb. 28, 1915.
28. Corporation deed between Pioneer Educational Society and Catherine H. Crosby, filed June 1, 1911; warranty deed between Catherine H. Crosby and Inland Brewery & Malting Company, filed July 2, 1911; quitclaim between Inland Brewery and Catherine H. Crosby, filed Jan. 15, 1913.
29. Born ten years after Bing and seven years after Mary Rose, Bob was born at 508 East Sharp Street and baptized on September 7, 1913, at St. Aloysius, birth certificate from Bureau of Vital Statistics. Harry Lowe was forty-three, Kate was forty.
30. Bob Crosby, RBT.
31. Lucky, p. 56.
32. Ted Crosby, The Story of Bing Crosby, p. 30.
33. Alice Watts, “Bing Was Her Favorite,” The Daily Olympian, Aug. 14, 1981.
34. Ibid.
35. Gregg Hammond, “Mary Rose Crosby Poole, “ The Crooner, no. 50, Nov. 1990. Also AI, KenTwiss.
36. Tacoma Daily Ledger, Sept. 19, 1915: He died September 18, at eighty-three, and was buried in Calvary Cemetary, Tacoma. In 1909 Dennis had been struck on the head by falling timber while inspecting construction of the governor’s mansion; his condition worsened in 1911. The death certificate gives the primary cause of death as myocarditis and a contributing cause as nephritis. In addition to his widow and seven children, he was survived by a brother, Patrick Harrigan, in Oregon, and fourteen grandchildren — seven of them Kate’s and Harry’s.
37. Bing told the same story on Radio Erin in 1961: “I remember my mother telling me that when her mother was on her deathbed…”
38. Cottrell in “Belly Flops at Little Vatican” (unsigned), The Inside Passage, Oct. 28, 1977.
39. Lucky, p. 66. Also William Stimson, “Bing We Hardly Knew Ye,” Pacific North west, Dec. 1987.
40. “My Boy Bing,” op. cit.
41. NET interview, op. cit.
42. Ibid. A fin is slang for five dollars.
43. Spokesman-Review, Jan. 7, 1916.
44. The poem by Thomas Dunn English was set to music by Nelson Kneass; Ben is implored to remember the long dead “sweet Alice.”
45. Also known as “A Dog Named Rover” and “What D’Ye Mean You Lost Yer Dog (Where’s That Dog-gone Dog-gone Dog of Mine),” and not to be confused with “Poor Old Rover,” which Bing did record. One night at a hunting lodge, in the 1960s, oilman George Coleman taped him singing it.
Bing: I’ve got a dog named Rover.
Hey Rover, come over.
He roams around all over.
He’s only home three times a day.
[whistles] I’m looking for a dog called Rover.
I’m looking for him now all over.
But he’s a hunter dog all right
’Cause he keeps me hunting day and night.
This is what I worry over.
Say, who put the rove in Rover?
[whistles, says, “My whistle’s getting dry”].
Sometimes I wish I were a tree.
Then Rover’d have to look for me.
Oh where’s that goddamn goddamn dog of mine?
[ends song, laughter]
Bing: My mom’s got a picture, took a picture…
Coleman: How old were you then?
Bing: Twelve. And I had that — you know, the knee pants?
46. Few people recorded that song or “A Perfect Day.” One who recorded both was contralto Elsie Baker, a Victor recording star during the mid-teens. Bing might have been surprised to learn that one of the most prolific composers of the kind of song marking his debut was a relative, albeit one so distant not even his parents knew of her. Larry uncovered the connection when he compiled his genealogy. Blind poet Fanny Jane Crosby was the protégée of George Frederick Root and the lyricist for his Civil War hit, “Rosalie the Prairie Flower.” She later published 8,000 hymns and songs, most under her married name, Mrs. Alexander Van Alstyne.
47. NET interview, op. cit.
5. Gonzaga
1. O’Brien interview, op. cit.
2. The classroom story was related by Corkery to a background reporter for Time.TIA. Francis Prange, who presided over the physics lab, later became known for his work in prison rehabilitation as chaplain at McNeil Island.
3. AI, Ray Flaherty.
4. Much of this section was drawn from Schoenberg, Gonzaga University, and Edward J. Crosby (Bing’s brother), “Gonzaga Past, Present and Future,“Gonzaga 11:1 (Oct. 1919).
5. Many contemporary education practices were established in such sixteenth-century texts as Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and the Ratio Studiorum(Plan of Studies). Material here is based on John W. Donahue, S. J., “Notes on Jesuit Education,” America, Oct. 26, 1983, and AI with Father Donahue.
6. Ibid.
7. “But wai
t. These worldly things too are sweet; the pleasures they give is not inconsiderable; we must not be too hasty about rejecting them, because it would be a shame to go back to them again.” Confessions, bk. 6, chap. 12.
8. Flannery O’Connor, “A Memoir of Mary Ann,” in Mystery and Manners.
9. Radio interview with Father Caffrey, issued on LP, Sunday in Hollywood with Ann Blythe and Bing Crosby, by the Maryknoll Fathers in the 1950s.
10. Lucky, p. 72.
11. Ibid., p. 70.
12. Schoenberg, Gonzaga University, p. 267.
13. Crosby, The Story of Bing Crosby, p. 47.
14. Thompson, Bing, p. 6.
15. Caffrey interview, op. cit.
16. Bob Crosby, RBT.
17. O’Brien interview, op. cit.
18. Crosby Genealogy.
19. Ibid.
20. Schoenberg, Gonzaga University, p. 249.
21. Bing especially enjoyed the team of Willie and Eugene Howard, who did Jewish dialect humor and impressions of top vaudeville stars.
22. The team was Sam Lewis and Joe Young.
23. Interview by George O’Reilly at Shepperton Studios, London, 1961.
24. “Brewing Concern to Make Vinegar,” Spokesman-Review, Jan. 17, 1917.
25. Theis as president, Lang as vice president, William Huntley as treasurer, and H. L. Crosby as secretary.
26. AI, Robert Kipp.
27. Bob Crosby, RBT.
28. AI, Peggy Lee.
29. Interview taped in Bing’s Paramount Pictures dressing room by Bill Tusher, 1951.
30. “A Mother’s Day,” op. cit.
31. “Belly Flops at Little Vatican,” op. cit.
32. Hal Prey, “Readers Knew the Famous When They Weren’t So Famous,” Remi nisce, Sept. 1994. Mrs. Stickney’s granddaughter recovered.
33. Dyar, News for an Empire.