All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  With the wind turning a trifle nasty and the occasional spit of rain now falling from a deceptively blue sky, youngsters with baggy trousers, fleecy overshirts and hoods pulled up seem more sensible than silly. And here if you’re under 21 the skateboard is less a performance device for pulling acrobatic stunts, as a means of locomotion along the pavements between parking lots.

  Spokane’s big moment – the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol would have recognised – came 35 years ago, in 1974, when it somehow or other managed to land one of those nebulous events that used to be known as World Expositions. A sort of mix of trade fair and national showing-off, the ’74 event – as witnessed by the little hexagonal concrete markers in today’s Riverfront Park – was dedicated to ‘Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment’, which in today’s ecologically threatened world might sound either poignant, ironic or just another example of the way we keep deluding ourselves we’re doing something.

  Personally, I opt for the last interpretation, particularly here in a town where, depressingly like Buffalo, you could walk everywhere but nobody does. Forty per cent of vehicles, even in this most urban area of inland Washington State, are huge suvs with the carbon footprint of a giant Jeremy Clarkson. Run on coal

  Of the World Expo ’74 only the US pavilion – inevitably – remains, and that, I fear, is rather a mistake, sitting there with only the skeletal framework of its roof remaining, like an inverted steel basketball net, while the body is a ruin in the making of slowly crumbling concrete. But then Spokane’s construction record has not always been everything the city fathers expected.

  The highlight of the city is – or rather ought to be – the great gorge of the Spokane Falls, a natural cataract that once roared and tumbled its way through the great grey rocks that struggled to contain it. A first bridge built in the late nineteenth century – I automatically think of the improbable structure erected each year at Niagara – was allegedly a rickety wooden affair which records from the time say felt a bit like a see-saw. It was replaced with a metal bridge which proved little better and public clamour at the dawn of the twentieth century forced the authorities to knock heads together and get a modern concrete one erected.

  Completed in 1911, this massive structure with its bison-skull ornamentation was a major source of civic pride, the sort of thing Spokane, which claimed the grandiose title ‘Monarch of the Inland Empire’ and was celebrating its heyday as a major railway hub, desperately needed to boost civic pride. The Monroe Street Bridge’s river-spanning central arch was, at 281 feet, the widest in the United States – one foot wider than the one in Cleveland. The architects insisted that they had not extended it an extra 12 inches deliberately. The city fathers beamed: ‘Of course not’.

  Mayor W.J. Hindley declared, ‘This bridge should stand as long as some of those bridges built by the Romans which are still as good as the day they were built.’ Within less than a single century – rather less than his millennial aspirations – the bridge had been so shaken by the elements and traffic growth that it needed almost total rebuilding in situ at a cost of some $18 million. Meanwhile a damn and controls on the water flow to maximise electricity generation have reduced the torrent to a trickle. Maybe some days it’s better than this but standing looking over the edge of the overblown bridge at the regulated water passing over the weir by the big redbrick Washington Water Power building, it all seems a bit vainglorious.

  For the 1974 fair they built a ‘unique attraction’, a cable car that ran downhill across the face of the falls. It has been replaced by a relatively modern (1992) ski resort-style gondola system, but there are few takers for the ride that is less than breathtaking when the water flow is so reduced to the extent that the thin stream of water disconsolately trailing down the rocks opposite looks more like an embarrassing leak than a force of nature. Niagara will not be panicking any time soon.

  But there’s more to Spokane than diminished railways, depleted cataracts and crumbling concrete: the home of its most famous son, one Harry Lillis Crosby Jr, who would come to be known to his friends and virtually the entire planet as ‘Bing’.

  Spokane gets leafier and less grimy as I stroll along the riverbanks towards what is undoubtedly the city’s most splendid institution, the improbably named Gonzaga University. The name’s origin lies not, as I initially suspected – as in the case of so many of the odder names across America – in some Native American tribe, but for Aloysius Gonzaga, a first-century Italian martyr and saint.

  Gonzaga was founded in 1887 as a school for pioneer children by the Rev. Joseph Cataldo, a Jesuit priest who had come to undo the mischief perpetrated by Protestant missionaries among the fur trappers and Spokane ‘children of the sun’ Indians ever since the trading post was established just 16 years earlier. It was still in its academic infancy when its most famous son was born only 16 years later.

  Young Harry Lillis Crosby, named after his father, was born into a prosperous middle-class family who had bought a spacious four-bedroom home on land set aside by the Jesuits from their original 350-acre land grant. The specification was that property should be sold only to good Catholic families, thereby creating an area of Spokane that came to be known as ‘Little Vatican’. It is still the most exclusive part of town.

  The university sprawls, in the nicest possible way, along the banks of the river, all red brick and low-rise with respectable-looking kids in jeans and sneakers hurrying along carrying books. The building I’m looking for isn’t hard to find – it’s now the student union. But not many of the kids piling through the doors to check on gig dates, sports events and upcoming Hallowe’en parties seem to notice any correlation between the word C-R-O-S-B-Y spelt out in big letters on the terracotta marble entrance and the bronze statue nearby of a genial-looking cove in a soft hat with one hand in his pocket and a bag of golf clubs by his feet. I’m willing to bet their university’s most famous son doesn’t feature on many of the iPods plugged into every other set of ears.

  Despite being a full generation older than most of them, I sort of know how they feel. Crosby was an absolute American icon in his day, but his day wasn’t mine either; it was my mother’s. She used to love him. To me he was just the rather laid-back pipe-puffing straight guy in those old black-and-white ‘road’ movies with Bob Hope, the funny man, who sounded all-American but we were all told really came from England.

  The worst thing about Crosby in those movies was that every now and then he would burst into song, in that strange warbling style that I came to learn was called crooning. If he didn’t invent it, he was certainly its master. Crosby inspired the young Frank Sinatra, even if he did lack the same important Italian connections. For Britons in the immediate post-Second World War days, Crosby, with his golf clubs and pipe attended by girls whose hair never fell out of place even when rolling along in an open-top car (largely because the car was stationary and the landscape on a screen rolling along behind them), summed up the seductive ‘American way of life’: Anglo-Saxon, easy-going, open-hearted, and above all affluent.

  Only two of his songs stuck with me: the cheesy ‘White Christmas’, repeated every year in the seasonal medley of high street stores, and, slightly more bizarrely, a 1950s advert: ‘I’m goin’ well, I’m goin’ swell, I’m goin’ well on Shell, Shell, Shell.’ The open top, the open road. The soft-sell American dream that seduced the world, and Britain in particular.

  Just inside the door of the Crosby Building is Bing’s own personal shrine. He was never actually a ‘college student’ in the modern sense, but attended the High School element of what was then only developing into a university. But he never forgot his formative years. In 1957, by which time he had been a popular idol and movie star for nearly a quarter of a century, he and his brother Larry, who was also his manager, decided to donate a few knick-knacks to the old ‘alma mater’.

  I’m just coming to grips with the collection of trophies, awards and memorabilia on display in the little room off the foyer, when two female students com
e in. One of them, with a sapphire stud in her nose, is showing round a visiting friend. I’m rather touched at this passed-on pride in the famous old boy, until she turns to her mate and says: ‘It’s kinda weird. I’ve never really seen anyone in here. I mean, like, Bing Crosby?! Whatever!’

  The exhibits, however, are a source of amusement as well as mystification. The pair burst into giggles at one showcase. As they move on to the next one I can see why. It contains an extraordinary piece of apparatus which the board beside it says is a 1955 ‘Delta Stereo 3D Camera’, complete with 10 spare flashbulbs, each about as big as my thumb, and a box emblazoned with a photo of Bing and the endorsement of the ‘Crosby Research Institute’. Bing, it would appear, liked to be known as an advocate of scientific advance.

  Amidst the collection of Crosby recordings in different formats – his oeuvre spans the gap from 78 rpm to DVD – the two girls’ eyes hit on the Christmas single ‘Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy’ by the unlikely pairing of Bing and Bowie, which the plaque says was recorded in 1977 for Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas. I’d forgotten about that one, despite being a Bowie fan. It always seemed a bit too weird, Bowie’s high-pitched ‘Peace on Earth, can it be’ soaring up and down while the old guy next to him hummed ‘Ba-rum-pa-pum-pum’. Bowie later said he appeared on the show ‘because my mother liked him’. It proved to be one of the last things Crosby ever did: it was recorded in September and he dropped dead on a golf course a month later.

  ‘Wow!’ the girls chorus. ‘That might be cool.’ At least they have heard of Bowie (that freaky English bloke their parents used to like). And then, whether on a timer or triggered by some hidden sensor that registers the presence of three or more people in the room, a quiet crooning of vintage Bing oozes softly from concealed loudspeakers. It’s bizarrely at this point that another young woman dashes in for about two seconds, says, ‘Hey, there’s no music, I’m like totally depressed,’ and leaves.

  An older passer-by – parent, grandparent? it is the beginning of term – stops outside for a moment to peer in the window, but finds it hard to see through the paint calling for ‘team applications for College Bowl’ (the US version and original of University Challenge), and wanders in, his eyes suddenly beaming with appreciation.

  Yet for any true Crosby fan the contents of this little room represent a serious cornucopia. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The few bits and pieces donated by Bing and his brother, the founding stones of what Stefanie Plowman, curator of the Crosby Collection, later tells me could be considered ‘Bing’s Presidential Library’. Only the most visually interesting objects are on display here. There are thousands of artefacts, mostly papers and fragile vinyl recordings stored in vaults upstairs.

  What anyone would want to see, however, is here. Encased behind glass are two of Bing’s favourite pipes and, slowly yielding to time, the silver-sleeved feather that was the favourite of the decorations he wore in his trilby hats. There are photographs of Bing in 1944 in France with General Patton, just days before he began his attack on Metz; Bing in more peaceable times playing golf at Gleneagles in Scotland, with Sean Connery and racing driver Jackie Stewart. There is a winner’s ‘genuine replica’ of the Oscar he was awarded for ‘best actor’ in 1944 portraying Father O’Malley in Going My Way (the original remains with his widow Kathryn), a role he reprised in 1946 for The Bells of St Mary’s, both awarded blue ribbons as suitable for the whole family.

  Not only are there most of Bing’s Decca gold discs for those timeless classics my own parents adored – although when I look a bit more closely I wonder if I ever did hear ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ or the highly unCrosbyeseque-sounding ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’. And I have to cringe at the well-buried memories suddenly conjured up by his Irish phase: McNamara’s Band or Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra. Dreadful stage-Irish jollity and weepy-eyed sentimentality put enthusiastically on the gramophone at family parties even into the early 1960s.

  Then there is, of course, the ‘platinum’ disc for the one Bing record none of us I fear will ever be able to ignore – unborn generations beware: ‘White Christmas’. It is dedicated by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1960 to ‘the first citizen of the recording industry whose unparalleled sales of more than 200 million records is greatly responsible for the recording business becoming one of America’s great industries.’ God alone knows what its inclusion on every Christmas collection ever since has added, but just a decade later it looked to have been swamped by over 300 million sales which won Bing a platinum for his version of ‘Silent Night’. Those mark the zenith of the Bing Crosby phenomenon that had already gone global a quarter century earlier when at least 15 million American radio listeners voted him, according to the award shield, the ‘World’s Most Popular Living Person’.

  It is hard to estimate how that compares with the trophy next to it, the Donnyflakes Donuts Award 1949 for the ‘Radio Star Whose Face Is Most Conducive to Dunking’. I can only suppose it meant listening to him encouraged one to sit back and enjoy a doughnut dipped in coffee, rather than looking at him made you want to plunge his smiling countenance into a hot latte. All the same, that reference to ‘face’ in an audio medium is puzzling.

  But then Bing obviously enjoyed a cup of coffee himself. To prove it there is another branded product, ‘Rancher Crosby’s Coffee Tap’ ‘tested and approved by the Crosby Research Institute for dispensing coffee from a can’. And marketed by a picture on the packet of ‘Rancher Crosby’ himself in Western mode with cowboy hat and bandana,

  So just what was this Crosby Institute? According to the official blurb, what began as the Crosby Research Foundation was Bing’s prescient 1940 attempt to do his bit for the coming conflict by subsidising resources to help the military develop the products they required. The museum provides no more information, perhaps for reasons of national security, so whether or not the Crosby Foundation was part of the Manhattan Project – the Bing Bang? – we may never know.

  Back in peacetime their efforts extended to almost everything, or at least everything that might sell better if Bing-branded, including the better mousetrap, or at least the ‘better built mousetrap’, a sturdy stainless-steel construction from the Gerrity-Michigan corporation that looked like it might survive decapitation of more unwanted rodents than most.

  For those of us who thought celebrity marketing was a relatively modern phenomenon, it turns out the Beckhams have nothing on Bing when it comes to pushing the brand. Perhaps I should have known, given the way that the ‘Shell, Shell, Shell’ song stuck, but I had not anticipated Valley Farm Bing Crosby Ice Cream (empty packet on display), a Bing-badged record cleaner, Bing Crosby Pepsodent toothpaste complete with the man’s glinting smile on the packet (full five-ounce tube) – Bing’s King Values 10 cents off!

  Then there’s the Crosby quoit game and a gambling horse-racing game that features Seabiscuit, the champion racehorse of the 1930s that became an American icon in the years of the Great Depression. And here’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of Bing in later years in full golf fig advertising the latest in air conditioning.

  And what about the younger Bing clad in – shockingly revealing for a man who usually appeared in slacks, hat and woolly jumper – just singlet and shorts, to advertise a tummy-toning stirrup and rubber pull-up device called the Stretch to Health, also endorsed by Cary Grant, Dorothy Lamour and Cecil B. DeMille. Now there’s a gym club to die for!

  Even the music wasn’t above prostitution to capitalism. One collaboration on display feature songs by Bing alongside Louis Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney and the Hi-Los, entitled Music to Shave By. It won its own mounted disc presented to Bing on behalf of the Adjustable Remington Automatic Shaver for the ‘biggest recording of 1959: six million copies pressed’.

  Despite this avalanche of Bing Bling, I have to take a look at the place where the legend was born. Over the years as Gonzaga University expanded it swallowed up many of the homes once sold from the ‘Little Vatican’ estate. Some were built on, b
ut the old Crosby home, a grey-painted clapboard two-storey bungalow with dormer windows, was preserved. Today it is the ‘Alumni House’, responsible for organising events for former students. When I knock on the door, I’m greeted enthusiastically by a member of the post-grad staff with, ‘Hey, come on in, sir’, in that endearing, reverential way young Americans of a certain class have of referring – at least face to face – to their elders.

  Back in Britain I might expect to be ignored at best; here I’m invited to look around and even try a glass of the hot cider (non-alcoholic) set up for a pre-Hallowe’en party, even though the day itself is still a few weeks away. The house is a classic design of the early twentieth century, remarkably open-plan by British standards. You walk into a wide hallway with stairs ahead, a living room to one side and dining room to the other, the entrance to each framed by an elegant hardwood surround. They have kept it furnished in ‘period’ 1940s style, with a pink clamshell sofa and a couple of comfy armchairs. There is a poster for the Oscar-winning Going My Way, and a blown-up black-and-white photograph of the old crooner in his heyday. All remarkably safe and middle class. But then so was Bing.

  Heading back along the riverside towards the less leafy and a lot more tarmaccy town centre, it’s not only painfully obvious that the students have very much the best of Spokane, but that yet again here is a US city centre decimated almost to the point of ruination by a lack of planning regulation and the obsession with the automobile.

  I hate to go on about what might seem an old hat observation, a well-documented truism about urban America, but you have no idea until you experience it on the ground, and I mean on the ground. Outside an indoor, air-conditioned (or heated) shopping mall, to be a pedestrian in most US cities is to lead a lonely existence wandering amid half-empty parking lots like the gaps between rotting teeth in an urban infrastructure palpably going to pot.