Bing Crosby (6 page)

The city’s indignation came too late to help Harry. In the first years of the century, Tacoma’s population had exploded from
38,000 to more than 84,000, but the expected fiscal boom was not forthcoming.
¹⁴
The economy was stymied by the consolidation of the timber industry and railroads. The increase in jobs did not keep up with
the number of job hunters. Like many others disappointed with prospects on the coast, Harry began to think about the inland
frontier and its burgeoning center, Spokane, 200 miles east, where logging and mining camps were proliferating as fast as
they once had in Tacoma. The prospect of a fresh start was made more imperative by Harry’s liberal spending.

The very week he was fired, he had come home with tickets for
The Merry Widow,
insisting that they had been given him by a friend. He and Kate “enjoyed every minute of the show,” Ted recounted in a fanciful
biography of Bing, noting with lingering embarrassment that Harry’s “sprees” exacerbated “their financial troubles on the
Coast.”
¹⁵
Just how much embarrassment and debt Harry incurred is no longer possible to ascertain, but given Kate’s keen sense of social
standing, such difficulties may have sparked her own willingness to leave their home, friends, parents, and siblings, especially
her sister, Annie, whose prospering marriage made Kate more envious than she liked to admit. Bing would later praise his father’s
hunch in recognizing Spokane as “a fine place for a man to raise his family,”
¹⁶
but he hinted at a darker motive in lauding it as a place where the people “don’t care who you are, what you’ve been, or
what your reputation was before they met you. It’s how you handle yourself after you arrive there that counts.”
¹⁷

Within a week of his dismissal, Harry was visiting Spokane, soon to become one of the world’s great wheat centers. Where wheat
is harvested, distilleries and breweries are sure to follow, and Harry landed a job as bookkeeper at the newly developed Inland
Brewery. Harry sold the house on J Street to Annie and her husband, Ed Walsh, for a dollar.
¹⁸
The nominal figure may indicate the settlement of a debt or the intention to resume ownership at a future date. The Walshes
never lived in the house but held on to it for many years before selling.

Harry had to begin work immediately, but Kate was in the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy with Mary Rose and could not
withstand the long, jolting rail trip. So he went alone, securing the rental of a roomy four-bedroom house in Spokane’s Catholic
district and fortifying it with furniture shipped from J Street. Kate and the children moved into a furnished house on South
I Street, half a mile from
their abandoned home and a couple of blocks from the austere box-frame house in which Annie and Ed Walsh lived and where the
children could be distracted. Everett was charged with watching Harry until Mary Rose was safely delivered, though Kate remained
ill and in bed for two months.

By early July Kate felt her strength returning, or recognized that the trip could be put off no longer. She said her good-byes
and in the grueling midsummer heat transported herself, the baby, the five older children, and several valises to the station.
They almost missed the train when the combative Everett disappeared to pursue an altercation with a newsboy. But he was located
in time, and the seven Crosbys boarded the Northern Pacific, bound for the Inland Empire.

The times were changing as the Crosbys pulled up roots. The week Spokane’s Inland Brewery announced the expansion that made
Harry’s job possible, a prankster in Chicago yelled “fire” outside a church during the Easter service, inciting a stampede
that took the lives of four parishioners, three of them children; and a mob of 5,000 in Springfield, Missouri, destroyed a
prison and hanged and burned three black teenagers accused of attacking a white woman, despite the woman’s assertion that
they were not the culprits. (The mob inadvertently freed nearly forty white bona fide criminals, causing a panic throughout
the area.) Three days later, at 5:13
A.M.,
a fierce rumbling woke San Francisco to the ordeal that demolished the city and stoked fires that raged for three days, taking
a thousand lives and leaving 250,000 homeless — the nation’s worst disaster since the Johnstown flood of 1889.

It was the era in which Lincoln Steffens damned the shame of the cities and Upton Sinclair revealed that the bodies of Chicago
meatpackers who drowned in mixing vats were processed with diseased cows and brought to market. New York tabloids ballyhooed
the first of many “crimes of the century.” after a deranged wastrel, Harry K. Thaw, defended the honor of his wife, showgirl
Evelyn Nesbit, by murdering the architect and libertine Stanford White. His attorneys argued that Thaw suffered from “dementia
Americana,” and his millions bought him several stays in a mental hospital while Nesbit augured talk-show renown by ventilating
her cautionary tale on the vaudeville circuit.

And yet despite unreasoning fears and exploding racial and ethnic hatred, it was an era of heroes — of larger-than-life people
who were honored without the slightest taint of cynical apprehension: builders, explorers, educators, thinkers, rebels, scientists,
tinkerers, politicians, industrialists, labor leaders. The
Spokesman-Review,
the major Inland paper, published a front-page poll in which regional educators, intellectuals, and writers were asked to
name the five greatest contemporary Americans.
¹⁹
The same men turned up on ballot after ballot: Teddy Roosevelt topped them all, followed by Thomas A. Edison, Charles W.
Eliot, Edward Everett Hale, Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, Luther Burbank, Samuel Gompers,
J. Pierpont Morgan. These men embodied the American character, enhanced the American profile, avowed an American century.
Spokane fit the bill; after driving out the Palouse Indians in 1905, the city sprang forward.

Nicknames are indicative of a change from a given to an achieved identity and they tell us something of the nick named individual’s
interaction with his fellows.

— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964)
¹

Old Spokane, called Spokane Falls, was little more than a post for trading with the Spokane and Couer d’Alene Indians. When
the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the settlement boomed overnight, attracting the Wild West’s familiar warring elements
— “respectable” people, including mining barons, and transient loggers, miners, and other laborers lured by liquor, gambling,
and prostitution. The hell-raisers had access to opium, provided by Chinese who had been brought in to lay track and were
then forced to live in the town’s dark back alleys. The values of the more conservative city fathers began to win out in 1889,
the year Washington won statehood, when a fire razed thirty-two blocks of the rowdy downtown district. The townsmen set about
rebuilding the city, using red brick and cast iron instead of wood. They imported architects with a taste for terra-cotta.
Ordinances were passed to make life harder for those who did not fit in. “Box” theaters, which provided whores and whiskey
in balconied boxes, were banned; saloons were shuttered on Sundays.

Spokane
{Falls
was dropped in 1891) flourished as the commercial hub of the Inland Empire, a wintergreen and dun-colored expanse
that wrapped its 150 miles around scores of towns, agricultural and mineral riches, forests and streams, seventeen lakes,
a rushing river, and falls that were claimed to rival Niagara.
²
The opening of the railway, in 1881, and the Coeur d’Alene gold rush, two years later, transformed the city and its surroundings.
But the Northern Pacific’s encroaching yards and warehouses spread over Spokane like a blotting shadow, overtaking the riverfront
and ultimately sealing the city from its breathtaking views of falls and rapids.
³

Yet “the Bond which Unites us with the Rest of the World,”
⁴
as the Northern Pacific characterized itself, brought Spokane undeniable dominance east of the Cascades. The population,
which numbered 350 in 1880, had grown to nearly 100,000 by 1906, when Kate Crosby and her children, exhausted and distempered
from the blistering heat and rattling journey, stepped from the train into a streaked sunset and saw Harry, smiling in his
straw hat beside a rented horse and wagon, eager to show them their new home.

The driver helped load the valises and, turning the wagon north, retraced much of the route Harry took from work every day
on the trolley, back through the business district and across the Spokane River to the residential areas. They proceeded east
of Division Street, the baseline from which avenues are numbered, to a developing working-class enclave known as the Holy
Land, for its Catholic churches, schools, convent, seminary, and orphanage. When they reached the yellow two-story house at
303 East Sinto Avenue, Harry unlocked the door and switched on an electric light, a convenience they had not enjoyed in Tacoma.
He pointed out the carefully installed furniture, the groceries, the indoor plumbing.

As the luggage was carried inside, Kate collapsed onto a chair in the living room. The older boys explored the upstairs bedrooms
where they would double up — Larry and Everett in one room, Ted and Harry in another, Catherine and the baby in the third.
Their parents slept downstairs in a room off the main area. Harry knew the reunion occasioned as much resignation as cheer.
In a 1937 account Ted and Larry describe Kate as a woman who renounced self-pity about what she had left behind; she had “acquiesced
in her husband’s decision to start anew” and considered herself a pioneer now.
⁵
In later years, however, she complained to Bing that they had arrived with “very short funds” and ran high food and fuel
bills, while her husband breezily dismissed her financial worries.
⁶

Nothing better symbolized the family’s ambivalence about Dad’s spending than the acquisition of a “talking machine” during
their first Spokane autumn, days after Kate enrolled her three oldest boys in nearby Webster Grade School. (The Holy Land
did not yet have a parochial elementary school.) Harry arrived home late one evening with a huge box — a gift, he claimed,
from a man who owed him favors. Beaming, he unpacked an Edison Phonograph, a machine that played cylinders with a wind-up
lever and amplified them through a bell-like horn. He also brought out recordings of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and —
to soften his wife — “The Merry Widow Waltz.” Kate mellowed, and the extravagance was happily accepted. But her concern about
Harry’s easy way with a buck was not easily allayed; the wariness died hard in her, and she passed it on to her children.
Even toward the end of his life, when Bing boasted of his father buying the neighborhood’s first phonograph, he allowed that
his old man had probably used the grocery money.

The marvelous machine, patented nearly three decades earlier by Thomas Edison, whose hopes for it were no grander than for
a Dictaphone, filled the house with trebly, tinny, yet vividly exuberant and often exotic sounds. Radio, as an entertainment
medium, was more than twenty years in the future. But for now they had this pipeline to the world and its music. By the time
the Edison and its cylinders were replaced by a phonograph that played platters, Dad had a collection ranging from the Peerless
Quartet to
The Mikado
to such singers as John McCormack (“Mother Machree,” McCormack’s theme, was one of his favorites), Harry Lauder, Henry Burr,
Denis O’Sullivan, and Al Jolson. Of the Irish tenors, Bing preferred McCormack: “I knew all his songs and I thought he was
a wonderful singer with great appeal, great sincerity, and a quality in his voice like a bird.”
⁷
But the sound that mesmerized the boy was the Broadway yawp of the dynamic Jewish minstrel, Al Jolson, whose intensity shattered
Spokane’s calm surface.

Harry had reason to feel secure about his prospects. A year earlier Spokane’s Heiber Brewery, a modern plant with an annual
capacity of 110,000 barrels of brew and malt, had switched hands to three partners, John Lang, William Huntley, and Charles
Theis.
⁸
They bought it — and two plots of real estate — for $300,000. Lang, a canny German-born businessman transplanted from San
Francisco by way
of Tacoma, changed the firm’s name to Inland Brewing & Malting Co., bought another six adjacent lots, built a cold-storage
plant and bottling works, and opened a wholesale agency in Moscow, Idaho. During this expansion, he hired Harry as bookkeeper.
Though modestly paid, Harry was attached to a growing business in a growing community. True, many deplored the shameful product;
the company offered home delivery to every part of the city in “plain wagons, plain cases.”
⁹
Even Harry hid his spirits. But the days of temperance fanatics like Carrie Nation were gone, or so most people thought.