Spokane's Bing Crosby Centennial celebration in 2003 put me in a somber mood. The celebration itself was fun — the flattery of hearing that people came from as far as England and South America to see Spokane, and so on. But for me it brought on the churn of emotions one feels at a wedding in the family: Despite all the fun and smiles, you can't shake the sad feeling that someone is leaving home.
Until he died in 1977, Spokane could claim Bing himself. He grew up in the yellow house up the street. He mentioned Spokane in interviews. Lots of people in town had known him and could tell funny stories about him.
Now time has passed. No matter how you package 100 years, it only connotes remoteness.
I brooded about this for months after the centennial celebration. Then finally I had a thought that made me feel better. We have been focusing on how a hometown boy made good. What gets a lot less attention is the other side of the equation, and the part that might be most instructive to a town of a famous son, namely: How a hometown makes a boy good.
One cannot read Gary Giddins' superb biography Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams without being impressed by how this average Spokane kid was coddled by his community. Crosby's father was a low-paid bookkeeper. Yet his family lived in a roomy house of their own on a wide street that connected all seven Crosby kids with almost unlimited opportunities.
Spokane and the Gonzaga neighborhood were so organized as to give a kid like Bing Crosby any kind of future he should aspire to. One of Bing's close pals, Ralph Foley, for example, went on to be a judge and father of a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Another of Bing's gang, Frank Corkery, would become president of Gonzaga University. Yet another friend, Ray Flaherty, became one of the great stars of the National Football League.
Bing himself took a liking to the stage and elocution. As he said himself, he had endless opportunities in school functions and other contests to flex these talents. "I won a couple of awards with Horatius and Spartacus," Crosby recalled in his autobiography. "I took those eloquent lines in my teeth and shook them as a terrier shakes a bone." He took part in plays and debates, but "the elocution contests were the big events. They were held in the parish hall and everybody in the parish came."
There's a good example of how a community stands behind its youth. It sits patiently in front of them while they make their awkward attempts to develop skills.
Notwithstanding the fact that he had little money and no scholarships, Crosby could aspire to a college education and a career in law. This was a present of the Jesuit fathers and many a protestant local booster who had helped them open Gonzaga three decades earlier. As a consequence, Spokane sent forth a certain type of entertainer.
According to Giddens, Bing Crosby was "the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education. It grounded his values and expectations, reinforcing his confidence and buffering him from his own ambition. As faithful as he was to show business, his demeanor was marked by a serenity that suggested an appealing indifference. He had something going for him that could not be touched by Hollywood envy and mendacity."
His philosophical education went on beyond the classroom. Bing was rambunctious and occasionally rebellious — the kind of liberty-seeking adolescent portrayed in his 1940s movies Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's. In Spokane, Bing was corralled by a tolerant and wise network of neighborhood parents, coaches, once or twice by policemen, and especially by the very sort of Fathers O'Malley that Bing had portrayed in the movies.
The most remarkable thing about the celebrity Bing Crosby, aside from his singing, was his humor. This, too, surely owed something to the old neighborhood. Many of the people in the neighborhood were, like Crosby himself, Irish, second and third generation mostly, and there is just something about the Irish personality that wants to smirk.
I can testify to this because I grew up in Crosby's neighborhood — four decades later — and I saw it and suffered from it 10,000 times. Spoofing and chiding were the tone of the neighborhood. The simplest thing, ordering a hamburger, say, becomes the occasion for verbal byplay over whether one's onions were a shame to the human race. I remember being in the University Drug Store and watching as the proprietor, Bill Stevens, rang up a line of purchasers. "Thank you, Mr. Stevens," said Mr. McGinn, taking his package. "And I just hope this time you gave me the right medicine! Boy was I sick that last time!" I was the only one who could see Mr. McGinn grinning as he headed for the door.
It was in Bill Stevens' drug store that I first discovered that the singer of "White Christmas" was thinking of the old neighborhood. I picked up a magazine from the rack and read one of those "The Stars Tell of Their Favorite Christmases" articles, and Bing recalled snow-filled trees and sledding down Sharp Avenue hill. That was where I had just been!
After Crosby sang "White Christmas" in 1942, according to The Great American Christmas Almanac: "Snow... became more important to the general Christmas scene than it had ever been before; it became essential. And that is why you have to have it annually in Puma, Ariz., simulated in rolls of white cotton... It no longer looks incongruous to anyone; we will have our White Christmas‚ no matter where we are or what the weatherman says."
Of course, Irving Berlin had New York City in mind when he wrote the lines of "White Christmas." But the sincerity in Crosby's voice when he sang of Christmases "just like the ones I used to know" certainly came from Spokane.
This is significant because "White Christmas" became "the anthem of Christmas sentiment," as one critic put it. It became the favorite Christmas song of 1942 and never lost that position.
Before "White Christmas," Crosby's 1935 record of "Silent Night" and, on the flip side, "Adeste Fideles," were the best-selling Christmas carols. He considered these sacred songs and refused to record them for commercial distribution until he eased his conscience by ceding all profits to charities.
"Bing was downright cowed by 'Silent Night,'" according to Giddins. Perhaps that was because he had first heard it intoned by 100 voices under the high dome of St. Aloysius Church at midnight Mass. I suspect so because as a kid I walked down the same street as he did on Christmas Eve to go to midnight Mass. To me, "Silent Night" will always be that experience of stepping into the mysterious winter night and walking under snow or a roving winter moon toward the church steeples, past the mute nativity scene outside the church, then into the cavernous church, alive with incense, candles and otherworldly voices, "...all is calm, all is bright..."
Since he first recorded "Silent Night" in 1935, Bing Crosby has remained the undisputed chief caroler of American Christmas. Why is that? No one can say what makes an aesthetic difference. Possibly, though, Bing Crosby, like many artists (including Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Robert Frost), searched for deeper meaning in the wells of childhood experience.
If so, there's a satisfying role for a hometown. Crosby did something to add to Christmas and — by doing something to improve Crosby — so did Spokane. ♦
First published in the Inlander on December 25, 2003, and also appears in Inlander Histories, Volume 1, available at Auntie's, Atticus and Boo Radley's. William Stimson is the author of Spokane: A View of the Falls. The Bing Crosby Film Festival is Dec. 19 at The Bing Crosby Theater.
