Bing Crosby (4 page)

Evers’s calamity prefigured that of Williamstown. As Great Britain reduced tariffs on timber from the Baltic countries, New
Brunswick’s timber industry declined. Town merchants foreclosed on their debts. Opportunities in the western United States
lured away the settlers’ children. The Williamstown settlement would be little remembered today but for the inordinate number
of eminent Americans whose New World roots are in those woods.
¹⁸
Dennis Harrigan’s descendants alone include, among his grandsons, William and John Harrigan, who built the Scotch Lumber
Company in Fulton, Alabama; Emmett Harrigan, head of a major law firm in St. Paul and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S.
Senate; and Ellen Sauntry’s brazen Miramichi-raised son, William Sauntry Jr., the millionaire lumber baron of Stillwater,
Minnesota, known as “the King of the St. Croix,” whose garish mansion, the Alhambra, stands today as a Stillwater tourist
attraction. Dennis’s great-grandsons include Lyman Sutton, president of Stillwater’s Cosmopolitan State Bank; Gordon Neff,
whose chain stores introduced supermarkets to Los Angeles; Colonel
Bill Harrigan, who helped rescue the First World War’s “Lost Battalion” in the Argonne Forest; bandleader Bob Crosby; and
Bing.

Dennis and Catherine passed away within a few years of each other and are presumably buried in a churchyard’s unmarked graves
in Red Bank, on the Miramichi River. They were almost certainly gone by 1866, the year several of their children, now in their
thirties and forties, left for Maine, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Dennis Jr., however, remained another fifteen months.
¹⁹
After attending school in Williamstown and Red Bank, he tried his hand at various jobs. While working as a logger in Newcastle
and later as a brewer, he boarded in the home of a friend, Michael Ahearn. In 1867, the year the Dominion of Canada was chartered,
he married Ahearn’s sister, Katie. Within weeks the couple headed south through Maine and across to Stillwater, Minnesota.

Dennis Jr., one of the most industrious and devout of his father’s sons (two or three brothers were thought to be ne’er-do-wells
and were probably alcoholic), eventually earned a reputation as a reliable, proficient contractor and builder, specializing
in church architecture. Stillwater provided a congenial setting for him to hone his skills; many Miramichi families, including
three of his siblings, had been drawn to the prosperous logging and rafting enterprises on the St. Croix River. He also continued
with his wife, Katie, the custom of large families. Married in their thirties, the two produced five boys and two girls between
1867 and 1879.
²⁰
They remained in Stillwater until the last was born.

According to the Crosby genealogy written by Larry Crosby (Bing’s oldest brother), it was Katie who advanced the family’s
musical calling. In his account, she “not only baked a wonderful pie, but sang like a bird, and it was common gossip when
she was out rowing on the lake, that either Katie Harrigan or an angel is out there singing.” Her boys were raised to be practical.
In Larry’s account, Dennis “wisely brought up four of his sons to be respectively [a] lather, plumber, plasterer and electrician.
They could build a house or win a fight, without any outside help.” Singing was a pastime, hardly a profession. Two grandchildren
of Ellen Sauntry, Dennis Jr.’s older sister, “won renown on the stage,” to the chagrin of their parents, who considered acting
“unmoral.”

Katie managed to pass on her love of singing to at least one child, her fourth-born and first daughter, Catherine Helen Harrigan,
who was delivered on February 7, 1873, in a boarding room above an old creamery.
²¹
This Catherine also inherited her father’s pious diligence. When her own children — Bing among them — were middle-aged, they
reminisced about her “sweet, clear voice”
²²
and took care not to smoke, drink, or swear in her presence. A childhood photograph of Catherine reveals a comely round-faced
girl who looks nothing like the severe image she presented in later years. In her large, pale eyes, one can see her mother’s
penetrating stare and her father’s hooded lids, both of which she passed on to her most famous son.

A year or two after Catherine was born, the Harrigans moved into a large boardinghouse on Main Street. Many of its thirty
or so tenants were from New Brunswick. Dennis probably owned part of the house, but in 1879, when the youngest of his children,
George, was born, he was able to secure a home of his own on Second Street, where he took in boarders to bolster his income.
In 1881, finding increasingly limited opportunities in Stillwater, he moved the family to St. Paul. Before the year was out,
he relocated again, to Knife Falls (now Cloquet), near Duluth, where his fortunes improved. He built that town’s first Catholic,
Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, as well as a school, and was appointed a church trustee. In 1885, with his reputation
as a builder secure, Dennis took his family back to St. Paul for three years. There Catherine, now twelve, and her brother
Edward spent their afternoons at the ice palace, he making and she demonstrating ice skates. They were obliged to earn their
keep beyond essentials, a Harrigan practice that Catherine, who could skate her name on ice, instilled in her own children.

The West had lured many Miramichi families, including a few of Dennis’s uncles and aunts, by the time he succumbed. Most had
relocated to Washington and Wisconsin, drawn by the booming economies set in motion by land speculators and lumber barons.
Dennis chose Tacoma, a seaport on Puget Sound, about twenty-five miles south of Seattle, where the lumber industry increased
the population tenfold in the 1880s. A boom was predicted when the Northern Pacific Railroad named Tacoma its terminus, and
in 1884 the city was incorporated from two smaller boroughs of the same name. Signs
of progress — electric lights, warehouses, shipways, a hospital — reflected the influx of thousands of blue-collar families
drawn by the promise of cheap lumber and land. No city in the nation boasted a higher percentage of families who owned their
own homes. Not even the scourge of racial violence halted growth; in fact, it may have helped. Tacoma created international
headlines when a mob led by city officials rounded up 200 Chinese residents at gunpoint and forced them to board southbound
trains. The United States was forced to pay China an indemnity, but the specter of competitive, minimally paid labor had been
subdued.

In 1888 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its pass through the Cascade Mountains and sold 90,000 acres of timberland
to the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumbering Company, which built a sawmill on the tidal flats of Commencement Bay. That year Dennis
and his eldest son, William, decided to make their move. Boarding in a Tacoma rooming house, they worked as carpenters until
they earned enough to buy a place that could accommodate Katie and the children, who arrived a year later. Dennis was fifty-seven,
old for carpentry, but he soon established himself as a contractor and built several notable structures, including Seattle’s
Hull Building and Tacoma’s Aquinas Academy annex, Scandinavian Church, and Dominican Sisters convent.

All but the two youngest children helped keep the Harrigans solvent. William, twenty-three in 1890, worked alongside his father
as a lather until he hired on as a streetcar conductor for the Tacoma Rail and Motor Company; Ambrose, twenty-one, was foreman
for an electrical-supplies concern; Edward, twenty, worked as a plumber; Catherine, who at seventeen was called Kate, fashioned
and sold hats for the G. W. H. Taylor millinery company; her fifteen-year-old sister, Annie, worked at home as a dressmaker;
at thirteen and eleven, respectively, Frank and George helped with the chores.

A few years later Kate took a job clerking at Sanford & Stone’s popular mercantile store on Tacoma Avenue and was designing
hats for a branch of the company that staged amateur theatricals.
²³
While appearing in one of those productions, she attracted the attention of an unlikely suitor: a mandolin-playing auditor
for the Northern Pacific, Harry Lowe Crosby.

Like unto a saga of old, runs the story of the coming of the Crosby family into the West.

— Mrs. George E. Blankenship (1914)
¹

By the time the Harrigans left Canada, the Crosbys had earned distinction in America, initially as seafarers based in New
England. They made history sailing around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest. Mrs. Blankenship could not contain her enthusiasm
in the chapter she devoted to the family’s accomplishments in her
Early History of Thurston County, Washington.
“In all the wild experiences related during the compilation of this book,” she wrote, “none were more picturesque and interesting
than the history of an entire family of stalwart sons and fair daughters with their aged but sturdy father, coming with their
own ship, laden with their own goods, their children and themselves, to take their part in conquering the wilderness.”
²

In focusing on Washington State, she traced the Crosbys only as far back as the 1840s, when the illustrious Captain Nathaniel
Crosby spurred and pioneered the territory. Larry Crosby’s genealogy dove centuries deeper into the paternal line, back to
“Vikings and Catholics” who settled in Ireland, Scotland, and northern England.
³
Crosby is a Danish name, meaning “town of the cross”
(Cros
is a transposition of the Danish
kors
and
by
is a diminutive of the Danish
burg).
In his account, written with mock lofty diction and printed in faux Old English type, the first recorded Crosbys were of the
Irish house of Ardfert, notably the Right Reverend John Crosbie, appointed bishop of Ardfert in 1601. The family spread out
over western and middle Ireland to Kerry and Queens, as far north as Tyrone (home to a knight, Sir Pierce Crosby) and as far
south as Cork, where the Harrigans also settled.

The family’s conversion to Anglicism was coerced during the reign of Henry VIII and was eventually fully embraced. Edmundus
Crosby served the king as cantorist at St. John’s in Doncaster, and Richard Crosby did likewise as auditor of St. John’s in
York.
⁴
The first in the line to reach the New World, in 1635, was Simon, who bought a homestead in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through
marriage, Simon’s progeny aligned the family twice over with descendants of the
Mayflower
Pilgrims, who preceded him by fifteen years.

In 1755 Deacon Nathaniel Crosby married into the brood of Elder William Brewster, a
Mayflower
alumnus whose family founded Brewster, Massachusetts, where many Crosbys lived until the early nineteenth century.
⁵
A generation later his grandson, Captain Nathaniel Crosby, the first in the family’s line of sea captains, married Ruby Foster,
who traced her ancestry to another noted
Mayflower
passenger, Governor Winslow. Those ties earned Bing membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. But Bing
neglected to mention those relations in his 1953 as-told-to autobiography,
Call Me Lucky,
preferring to concentrate on the outstanding men of the sea.

Yet, as Larry discovered, several Crosbys “distinguished themselves in the learned professions and as military leaders in
the Revolutionary War.” Josiah Crosby, inadvertently overlooked by Larry, signed a declaration of the Continental Congress
in Amherst in 1776 as a representative of New Hampshire.
⁶
The family’s most celebrated colonial, however, was Enoch Crosby, who joined the Continental Army at twelve as a spy and
claimed to be the model for Harvey Birch, the undercover hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s bestselling 1821 novel,
The Spy.
Cooper testily denied Crosby’s claim: “I know nothing of such a man as Enoch Crosby, never having heard his name, until I
saw it coupled with the character of the Spy, after my return from Europe.”
⁷
But on the evening C. P. Clinch’s adaptation of the novel opened at New York’s Park Theater (not ten weeks after the book
was first published), Enoch appeared in his box to “thunders of applause.”
⁸
Cooper admitted he based his story on an anecdote told to him by Governor John Jay and subsequently conceded he never learned
the name of the spy, because “Jay felt himself bound to secrecy.”
⁹
It is known that Jay arranged for Enoch Crosby to enlist as a spy in the British army, and that Enoch refused, Birch-like,
his offer of a reward.

Whether Crosby was the prototype for Birch (who exemplifies for Cooper’s General Washington “the patriotism that pervades
the bosoms of [our] lowest citizens”), the twentieth-century Crosbys were proud to claim a hero of low estate, even as they
vouched themselves two coats of arms. Somewhat defensively, Larry explained that heraldry “does
not
denote an aristocratic class, but rather personal merit secured by the humblest as well as the highest.” The motto of their
Irish arms — depicting two hands, a lion, and three swords— is
Indignante Invidia Florebit Justus
(Despising envy, the just shall flourish). The English arms display three rams and the motto Liberty Under Thy Guidance,
the Guidance of the Lamb of God. Bing preferred the Irish emblem, sporting it on the breast pockets of his blazers.