Bing Crosby (5 page)

Captain Nathaniel, known as Nathaniel Jr. or Nathaniel II, was the fourth Crosby of that name in a line that produced three
or four more.
¹⁰
Born in 1810, in East Brewster, Massachusetts, he and his brothers, Clanrick and Alfred, were tutored in the seaman’s life
by their father, who commanded a vessel out of Cape Cod. In his twenties, Nathaniel moved to Wiscasset, Maine, where he married
Mary Lincoln and raised a family. By 1844 his reputation for daring had earned him a commission from a U.S. government agent
to command the brig O. C.
Raymond,
charged with taking emergency supplies from Boston to immigrants who poured into the Oregon Territory seeking their fortunes.
Reaching the mouth of the Columbia River, he continued to Portland, an outpost of log cabins, and put his crew ashore to build
a warehouse for his cargo. That cabin survived as the settlement’s post office.

Crosby took to the community, enchanted by the vitality of the frontier and the commercial promise it held, discerning for
himself a role amid the burgeoning industries and direct trade routes to Hawaii —
still known as the Sandwich Islands — and China. He decided to transport his family and made one last visit to New England
to outline his plan. Over the next few years, Captain Crosby traded along the West Coast and Hawaii, ferrying supplies at
government behest to secure the territory and earning enough money to enable his brothers to purchase the
Grecian,
a 247-ton brig. In September 1849, with twenty-four people on board, all but five of them relatives, the
Grecian
left New York.
¹¹
Clanrick and Alfred served as captain and second officer. On board were their wives, children, in-laws, housekeeper, and
their retired father, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Sr.

Within five months the Crosby brig rounded the Horn and docked in Portland. The party continued to the small settlement of
Tumwater. That town, incorporated three years earlier, consisted of little more than a blockhouse and a few one-room cabins.
It became home to Clanrick and his family. In partnership with a man named Gray, Clanrick bought a gristmill and land along
the river, eventually building a general store and emerging as a prominent citizen, a leader and philanthropist. His father
also lived there a couple of years but returned to Cape Cod shortly before his death. Alfred moved his family to Astoria,
Oregon.

The man responsible for the emigration, Captain Nathaniel Crosby Jr., soon tired of sedentary life. Early in 1852 he transported
his family — and the first cargo of spars (poles used in the rigging of ships) ever sent from the Pacific Coast — to China.
After establishing a home in Hong Kong, he returned for a second consignment of spars, this time from Olympia, the growing
settlement at Tumwater’s northern border, soon to be designated capital of Washington Territory. He died in Hong Kong four
years later, leaving a widow; two daughters, Mary and Martha; and a son, Nathaniel. All but Martha quickly returned to Tumwater.
¹²

Clanrick helped young Nat get on his feet, selling him a parcel of land at Tumwater’s north end and employing him at the mill.
Nat took a wife, Cordelia, and prospered for a time, building a spacious, two-story A-frame house with a small cherry orchard
out front. But a bad investment in steamships annihilated his savings, and he was forced to relocate to Olympia, where he
found employment as postmaster. (Although they lived in the Tumwater house only a few years, it continued to be known as “the
old Crosby home,” and in 1949 the
deed was given to the local chapter of Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington in return for its restoration and preservation.
¹³
Bing contributed $1,800 toward the purchase and gave the Daughters two chairs his grandparents had owned when they lived
in the house.) Nat and Cordelia raised two sons. Frank Lawrence, born in Tumwater in 1862, made a name for himself in the
Puget Sound area as U.S. deputy marshall residing in Tacoma, thirty miles northeast; his brother, Harry Lowe, born in Olympia
on November 28, 1870, developed a less exacting attitude toward life.

Given the eight-and-a-half-year gap between the births of Frank and Harry, each may be said to have been raised virtually
as an only child, but it was the younger who became a provincial dandy. Pampered by servants throughout his childhood, Harry
was by all accounts a guileless young man, lighthearted and informal, unburdened by ambition, hail-fellow-well-met — in short,
a model for the character Bing Crosby would bring to movies in the 1930s. He was appealing in a ruddy, moonfaced way, favoring
broad suspenders and a rakishly tilted straw hat, and he loved music. Accompanying himself on mandolin or a four-string guitar,
Harry sang old favorites made popular by roving minstrel troupes, newer novelty songs and ballads, Chinese ditties learned
from the Asian servants his mother had brought home from the Orient, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Mikado
was the rage of the 1890s, and a cousin of Harry’s, Sam Woodruff, famously toured the Northwest as Koko.

Harry sang with an Olympia-based men’s choir, the Peep-O’-Day Boys, and played in the city’s silver cornet band at about the
time Kate Harrigan was singing in a Tacoma church choir. In 1890, after dropping out of college, Harry moved to Tacoma, where
Frank lived, and found work as a bookkeeper for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s Land Department. For three years he lived
in a string of hotels and rooming houses, but his bachelor days were numbered when he encountered the stabilizing glint-eyed
gaze of Miss Harrigan appearing in a department-store theatrical.

From the first, they seemed oddly matched, a devout Catholic courted by a casual Protestant. Kate was a willful, disciplined
young woman who distrusted luck and abhorred sloth. Harry was incapable of raising his voice and trusted less to Providence
or God than to
goodwill and serendipity. In time, she would come to be characterized as humorless, even autocratic. He never lost the epithet
earned as a young man, Happy Harry — though it was amended much later to Hollywood Harry. The women employed in Bing Crosby’s
offices were more bemused than offended by Dad Crosby’s fanny-pinching, in light of Mother Crosby’s temperament, which brought
everyone, including her sons, to solemn attention.

Music may have sealed their courtship, but Harry’s willingness to convert to Catholicism made possible their marriage. He
established a standard other non-Catholics would be expected to uphold as a precondition to marrying into the family. The
wedding took place in a small wooden church, Holy Rosary, on January 4, 1894, and the couple moved directly into the hotel
— St. John House — in which Harry boarded. Within weeks they acquired their first of several houses in the alphabetically
configured city. Located in the “backwoods” area of N Street,
¹⁴
this house came to Kate’s mind fifty years later when a writer solicited her Mother’s Day recollections. “One of my warmest
Mother’s Day memories goes back to before the children were even born,” she said, “back to the day when their father and I
knew we had established a home for them, a place warm and livable, and I could close my eyes and imagine them there.”
¹⁵

There are literally millions of Crosby relatives around these parts.

— Burt McMurtrie, columnist (1948)
¹

Kate Crosby wouldn’t have to imagine for long. She was expecting when she and Harry moved into the house at 616 South N Street.
On the third day of the New Year, 1895, Laurence Earl was born at home. Before the year was out, they moved to a better neighborhood,
near Wright Park, and a bigger house to accommodate Harry’s mother, Cordelia, who lived with them for a few months. In that
house, at 110 North Yakima, a second son, Everett Nathaniel, was born on April 5, 1896. The family’s fortunes changed when
Harry lost his job with the Northern Pacific and was forced to scuffle for work through the depression years of 1897 and 1898.
His plight may account for the four-year pause before more children arrived. The Crosbys moved twice more, never beyond the
radius of a few blocks in the residential district just north of downtown Tacoma.

Harry’s luck changed in 1899, when he was hired as a clerk in the Pierce County treasurer’s office, under Treasurer Stephen
Judson, who had been one of the Washington pioneers of the 1850s.
²
The family was now able to rent a handsome three-story, many-gabled corner house at 922 North I Street, where their third
son, Edward John,
was born on July 30, 1900. Judson was defeated in the Republican sweep of 1902, but his successor, John B. Reed, promoted
Harry to bookkeeper. That December Harry celebrated his good fortune by purchasing, for $850, two adjoining lots on J Street,
between North Eleventh and North Twelfth, with the intention of building a residence he estimated would cost $2,500.
³
The deed was made out to his wife, who could never feel truly settled in a rental.

Construction at 1112 North J was completed ten months later, in the first weeks of a cold winter. Set on a grassy incline
from the street, the wooden two-story frame house had wide eaves and a large front porch with three sets of double columns
supporting a roof porch just below the second-story bedroom windows. Harry and Kate permitted themselves the luxury of a piano.
Down the street they could see Puget Sound, and only three blocks away stood St. Patrick’s, the small wooden church that had
served the community for a dozen years and where Edward (Ted) was baptized.

Kate was pregnant again during the construction, with a due date in mid-spring. As the day approached, the stinging April
winds suddenly departed and she delivered her fourth son on Sunday, May 3, which the
Daily Ledger
declared
AN IDEAL SUMMER DAY.
⁴

Kate, who had just turned thirty, and Harry, finally established in the city’s middle class, decided that this boy’s arrival
merited a public announcement. For the first time, they alerted the newspapers of a newborn. When the
Daily Ledger
failed to print the item in “City News in Brief” until May 5, implying with the word
yesterday
that the great event had taken place on May 4,
⁵
Kate stipulated the correct date for its rival, the
Tacoma Daily News
(“Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby are receiving congratulations on the arrival of a son at their household May 3”),
⁶
and requested a correction from the
Ledger,
which appeared on May 7.
⁷

On May 31, accompanied by Kate’s younger brother Frank and his wife (the boy’s godparents), Harry and Kate carried the infant
to St. Patrick’s for his baptism.
⁸
Harry was disappointed at not having a girl, but Kate placated him by naming the boy after him. For his middle name, however,
she chose Lillis, after a neighborhood friend, circumventing a generational ranking of senior and junior (though both Harrys
would often use those designations). Happy Harry cradled the
infant in his arms, looked into blue eyes that would never darken, and gave forth in song, “Ten Baby Fingers and Ten Baby
Toes.”
⁹

For all the decisiveness with which May 3, 1903, was flagged as Harry Lillis Crosby’s birthday, the date proved controversial
in and out of family circles.
¹⁰
In all official accounts (generated by Paramount, Decca, the Crosby offices, and, most insistently, Bing himself), it was
altered by one day and one year, to May 2, 1904. The true date was additionally obscured as two of his older brothers came
to believe he was born in 1901. Bing lost the year early in his career at the conniving of Everett, who, acting as his manager,
believed he was shaving three.

The first of young Harry’s two younger sisters, Catherine Cordelia, named after her mother and her recently deceased grandmother,
arrived on October 3, 1904.
¹¹
The second, Mary Rose, with whom Harry developed a particular childhood affinity, followed on May 3, 1906. That Kate delivered
four of her six children on the third day of the month is merely an actuarial oddity; that she delivered two on the same day
of the same month created birthday havoc, as Mary Rose insisted on having the day to herself.
¹²
Peace prevailed when Harry’s birthday was advanced by twenty-four hours. In later years Mary Rose would triumphantly produce
the family Bible in which their father assigned Harry May 2.

By the time Mary Rose arrived, the family fortunes had once again bottomed out. Harry Crosby’s benefactor, John B. Reed, was
ousted in the 1904 election by his former cashier, Edgar M. Lakin, who advanced Harry to the title of deputy in the county
treasurer’s office.
¹³
Of the eight men working in the treasurer’s office, Harry had been there the longest. Yet he was fired late in 1905, presumably
so that Lakin could reward a political crony. After several more firings, complaints that city employees were being dismissed
on trumped-up charges grew widespread. In April 1906 the citizens of Tacoma approved a city charter amendment requiring a
public hearing and ratification by a two-thirds majority of the city council before a city employee could be discharged.