Bing Crosby (9 page)

That same summer Bing added to his finances by caddying. He talked members out of old clubs and played the course on Mondays,
becoming obsessed with golf, which replaced swimming as his preferred exercise. During his years in Hollywood, Crosby became
an expert golfer, but he had some qualms about keeping a swimming pool and filled in at least one. The presumed reason was
his fear that the neighborhood children might have accidents, generating lawsuits. Twenty-three summers after his triumph
at the Mission Park pool, Bing attempted to exercise his swimming skills and almost had an accident of his own, at the 1939
New York World’s Fair.

Driving back from a golf match with his friend mining heir Harvey Shaeffer, Bing suggested they catch the show at the Billy
Rose Aquacade, featuring Eleanor Holm and Bing’s friend from Hollywood Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimming champ who
became the definitive Tarzan. As Weissmuller introduced the divers, who were climbing up to a fifty-foot board, Bing casually
mentioned that he could dive from that height. Shaeffer bet him a hundred dollars he could not. They went backstage. Telling
no one but Weissmuller of his plan, Bing borrowed a farcical full-body swimsuit and matching hat and anonymously waited his
turn. When it came, he embraced the caper with comic aplomb and was airborne before realizing that his pipe was clamped between
his teeth. Fearing it might be driven through his neck, he aborted an intended jackknife in favor of a feet-first plunge.
He lost his pipe, incited a furious Billy Rose (who also feared accidents and lawsuits), and collected sixty-five dollars
from Shaeffer, who would not accept the plunge as a dive.

Harry mused, “All of our children were musical, but I must admit I had a soft spot in my heart for Bing, because I liked to
hear him sing.” He brought him down to the Spokane Elks Club and had Bing perform for the members. “The piano player of the
Elks Quartet became so interested in Bing’s singing that he gave him lessons.”
⁴⁰
Those lessons, if they took place (Bing never spoke of them), would probably have been gratis. Kate took as focused an interest
in his singing as in his swimming. “[She] gave me every break,” Bing said. “In fact, she
took me to a teacher. I had about three lessons and she paid for them and she didn’t have the money to spare at the time.
I think the lessons cost five dollars a session. He gave me some things to vocalize on, some scales on the piano, and I think
I went about three times, but I kept up the vocalizing for a few years — I think it loosened me up. That’s the only formal
musical training I ever had.”
⁴¹
In his memoir, Bing claims that the lessons petered out when the professor discouraged pop songs and emphasized tone production
and breath control. But shortly after Kate’s death, he admitted the trouble was financial: “That fin, you know, every second
week, was a little strong for my mother to come up with.”
⁴²
Kay’s piano lessons, however, continued.

The Crosbys were now facing their worst crunch. On January 1, 1916, Washington went dry. The postboom cleanup, previously
directed at gambling and prostitution, claimed one of the city’s major legitimate businesses, three years before the rest
of the country had to answer to the Volstead Act. Prohibition and the concurrent sale of the big mines brought an end to Spokane’s
growth years. Inland Brewery failed to accept or prepare for the drought, except with layoffs. Harry survived, at a drastically
reduced salary, while the company tried to figure out what to do. The city chemist’s confirmation, on January 7, that there
was no trace of alcohol in Inland’s “carbonated fizz near-beer” did nothing to stimulate sales.
⁴³
As things got worse, so did Harry’s wages. During some months he may not have been paid at all: for the years 1915 and 1916,
he indicated no employment in his entry in the city directory.

In those dark days, Kate became preoccupied with Bing; just weeks before supervising his triumph at the Mission pool, she
dressed her son in finery for his first formal musical performance. At a women’s function, he sang typically sentimental numbers
such as “Ben Bolt,” a poem set to a German melody in 1848,
⁴⁴
and “A Perfect Day,” a 1910 hit by vaudevillian Carrie Jacobs-Bond. For an unsolicited encore, he held a leash in his hand
and sang “My Dog Rover,” a ditty he loved.
⁴⁵
With little provocation, he would sing it in later years on well-lubricated hunting and fishing trips, though he never recorded
it. Of the songs he sang that day, the one that seemed to bring out the most in him was a recently published secular hymn,
“One Fleeting Hour.”
⁴⁶
With a broad range of eight whole notes and a forte-grande top-note finish, it was an imposing showpiece for the
twelve-year-old. In the 1970s, when television interviewers asked him about his first experience before an audience, Bing
unhesitatingly volunteered a few bars:

When the twilight of eve dims the suns last ray

And the shades of the night gather fast,

There’s one fleeting hour that I’ve pray’d would stay,

Full of joy and of pain that’s passed.

Yet he never performed it professionally. Bing found his first appearance mortifying. In addition to having to get gussied
up, he had to endure a cool reception — nothing like the kind his exuberant uncle George enjoyed.

Bing had never been hesitant about singing for friends, but performing for church groups was another story, inclining him
to play harder with the gang. “My mother dressed me up in some fantastic attire, the knickerbockers and the flowing ties,”
Bing said. “That embarrassed me more than the singing, I believe. And of course the fellas I ran around with all thought singing
was for girls or for sissies, certainly not for anyone who was going to be an athlete. Because we were mostly, as a group,
concerned with rock fights and going down to the millpond and running logs and hooking rides on railroad trains and robbing
the bakery wagon and things of that caliber, which were considered a little more adventurous and colorful than standing up
in front of a ladies’ sodality and singing ‘One Fleeting Hour.’”
⁴⁷
He was reprieved for a while when his voice changed, after which he was less shy about asserting himself in style and repertoire.

I was eight years with the Jesuits, four high school, four college. Yeah, pretty well indoctrinated.

— Bing Crosby (1976)
¹

As a student at Gonzaga High School, part of the small complex of redbrick buildings on Boone Avenue that made up Gonzaga
University, Bing could almost roll out of bed and into class. He was often late. The assembled students listened for his unhurried
approach: first the slamming of the back door, then a few bars of whistling, then a popular song as he ambled through his
backyard to the end of the block, crossed Boone, and strolled into class. After he began haunting weekend vaudeville shows
at the Pantages, he made a point of arriving early on Monday mornings to entertain the class with imitations of the comedians
and singers who passed through town. Frank Corkery marveled at his ability to memorize routines down to the corniest gags.
Far more unusual was Bing’s self-possession — his extraordinary presence of mind.

Once, before physics class, the gang lured Bing into a storage space, then locked him in just as the instructor arrived. Did
he bang on the wall of that black hole and holler for someone to let him out? Hardly. He made no sound at all until the instructor,
Francis Prange, uttered his first remarks, at which point Bing’s voice, crooning “The
Missouri Waltz,” floated through the room. The teacher stopped, as did the singing. Prange glanced out the window, looked
around the room, then resumed. The mysterious if unmistakable voice sang out a second time. Prange quieted, and so did the
song. With the next encore, he trailed the voice to its lair, liberated Bing, and dragged him to the principal’s office.
²
It was typical of Bing, a classmate noted, to turn a prank played on him into a more inventive prank of his own.
³

Gonzaga’s history was well known to the community.
⁴
In the autumn of 1865, Father Joseph M. Cataldo, a Jesuit missionary from Sicily, entered the Inland Empire, traveling on
horseback to Couer d’Alene Mission. Within a year he had built a chapel at Peone Prairie, winning the confidence of the Spokane
Indians. Under his leadership, a Catholic orphanage and the Sacred Heart Hospital were constructed. In 1881 he began to build
a school for Indians on 320 acres of land just north of the Spokane River, purchased for 936 silver dollars from the Northern
Pacific Railroad. Coolie labor made bricks from clay on the riverbank where four decades later the McGoldrick Lumber Company
appeared. After six years of delays, Gonzaga College —named for the family of Saint Aloysius, patron saint of youth —opened
its doors. But by that time Cataldo’s intentions were undermined by white settlers, who needed schooling for their own children.
They insisted that the two-story building with basement and dormitory attic serve them exclusively. Seven boys, ages eleven
to seventeen, arrived the first week, greeted by an eight-man faculty —four priests and four scholastics. By 1900 two more
buildings had been added to accommodate increased enrollment and a high-school curriculum. A law school followed in 1912,
changing Gonzaga’s standing to that of a university.

Jesuit pedagogy in America focused on educating the middle class, extending the liberalism of the Greeks in the cultivation
of grammar, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, in addition to science. “The right word is a sure sign of good thinking,”
the Athenian Isocrates instructed.
⁵
Writer Michael Harrington, a self-described “pious apostate,” once remarked of his own Jesuit education, “Our knowledge was
not free floating; it was always consciously related to ethical and religious values.”
⁶

Bing’s devout mother underscored the moral imperatives encouraged during his eight years at Gonzaga. But the stern principles
affirmed by her hairbrush were more unforgiving than the liberal inquiries of the Jesuits. Bing drew on both in creating the
character of Father O’Malley
(Going My Way
and
The Bells of St. Mary’s),
a paradigm of scholastic progressiveness. Privately, however, he was obliged to bargain his way out of a hellfire that was
no more metaphorical to him than a golf club. His inclinations toward wildness could be indulged only in the context of an
Augustinian postponement.
⁷
Bing would have understood Flannery O’Connor’s injunction “Good is something under construction.”
⁸
That part of him remained secret and unknowable, rehearsed only in the Sunday masses he attended without fail all his life.

In a 1950s radio interview with Father Caffrey, a genial radio priest, Bing recalled in typically breathless style (substituting
conjunctions for punctuation) the “wonderful men at Gonzaga in those days.”

The university was only twenty-five or thirty-five years old then and there was still some of the pioneer staff of the Jesuit
order, men around seventy-five or eighty years of age who had come out there in the Indian missions, as Father Cataldo and
some of his followers had done, and they were brilliant men, men with great background in the missionary field, and I was
much impressed with them, of course, because they had many stories to tell, incidents that happened in the first settlements,
working with the Indians, and I was much impressed with their piety. I get a great deal of consolation from my religion, Father,
and I think it was firmly embedded in me somehow back there at Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University by the good Fathers.
⁹

In his memoir, he credited the priests, whom he invariably describes as powerful and manly, with imparting to him “virility
and devoutness, mixed with the habit of facing whatever fate set in my path, squarely, with a cold blue eye.’”
¹⁰
The cold blue eye was in his case genetic, the devotion inculcated, the fortitude willed.

Bing encountered one of the most formidable of those men on his first day, when he and a couple of friends went to register.
Father James “Big Jim” Kennelly was a looming but beloved figure, pale-eyed and slope-shouldered, standing six foot three
and weighing nearly 300 pounds, garbed in a floor-length black cassock fixed at the waist by a lengthy chain weighted with
a ring of keys. As prefect of discipline since 1899, Big Jim was known for flicking his key ring at the bottoms of miscreants
with, in Bing’s observation, “the accuracy and speed of
a professional fly-caster.”
¹¹
He was no sadist, Bing quickly added, just a conscientious disciplinarian who was always willing to tuck his cassock into
his pants and join the boys on the playing field. Bing may have presumed too much on Kennelly’s reputation as a “rah-rah”
man and erstwhile star athlete.
¹²
Asked about his desire to study, Bing allegedly told him, “Yeah, and play some football,” escaping the key ring by inches.
¹³