Spokane’s most famous native honored

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 7, 2006

SPOKANE – He was arguably the most popular entertainer of the 20th Century, and unarguably the most famous person to ever grow up in Spokane.

Now Bing Crosby will finally have a landmark in his hometown.

The former Met Theater in downtown Spokane, where Crosby performed as a young man, will be renamed The Bing Crosby Theater at a public ceremony Friday.

The “Wing Ding for Bing” culminates an effort by Spokane historian and journalism teacher Bill Stimson, who noticed one day that little in the Lilac City was named for its favorite son and suggested the Met might be a good choice.

“We’re stepping up and doing what we should have done long ago,” Stimson said. “This is where Bing Crosby learned his trade and became ‘Bing Crosby.’ “

Crosby was born in Tacoma in 1903, but his family soon moved to Spokane and he remained a figure in the city’s history for the rest of his life. The singer returned often to visit family and friends, and he was a generous donor to Gonzaga University and other causes.

“The guy never left Spokane until he was 22 years old and in a sense he always remained a kind of a homebody,” Crosby biographer Gary Giddins wrote in “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams.”

The Met was built in 1915 as the Clemmer Theater, a gilded, 800-seat movie house in a brick, neoclassical style in downtown Spokane. It fell into disrepair until a Spokane-based financial conglomerate bought it in 1988, rehabbed it, and reopened it as the Metropolitan Performing Arts Center as a home for concerts, lectures and movies.

Crosby and his group, billed as The Musicaladers, performed in the theater as the house band between May and October 1925, playing between movies.

“That’s where he spent five months practicing his act,” Stimson said. “He was a big hit there.

“Then he got in his car and went to Hollywood,” Stimson said.

After talking with Met owner Mitch Silver, who gave his approval, Stimson contacted Crosby’s widow, Kathryn. An actress who lives on a ranch in Nevada, Kathryn Crosby was delighted by the idea and volunteered to bring her cabaret act to Spokane to raise money to buy the new sign. The act reminisces on her 20-year marriage to Crosby, which ended with his death in 1977.

Crosby has not been completely ignored here. He holds an honorary doctorate from Gonzaga University, and he was a major benefactor of the school. The student union building is named for him, and there is a statue of him out front. Crosby was also made an honorary mayor of Spokane. Oct. 16, 1946, was recognized as “Bingsday” in his honor.

But Stimson believes Spokane has not cashed in fully on Crosby’s celebrity.

“We get used to the idea that he was just one of the kids from our hometown,” he said.

Crosby was much more than your average celebrity.

His radio shows in the 1930s had audiences of 50 million people, essentially everyone who owned a radio at the time, Stimson said. The relaxed singing style he developed influenced crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. He was an Oscar-winning actor, a major television star and a technological innovator.

“Where would we be without ‘White Christmas’ at Christmastime?” wondered Stephanie Plowman, a librarian and curator of Crosby memorabilia at Gonzaga.

Plowman estimates there are 25,000 items in the Crosby collection, including a copy of his Oscar for “Going My Way,” numerous gold records, photographs, sheet music, the majority of his sound records, 1,400 radio show discs, film and television scripts and correspondence.

The collection draws visitors from all 50 states and about 25 foreign countries each year, said Plowman, who helped create a Crosby display at the renamed theater.

“It is time for the city to recognize the fact that he is still known worldwide,” Plowman said. “While alive he put Spokane on the map and still does.”

Crosby had an idyllic upbringing in Spokane. He acquired his nickname because of his fondness for a Sunday newspaper feature, “The Bingville Bugle.”

“Crosby’s boyhood suggests nothing so much as an Irish Catholic version of Huckleberry Finn’s, albeit one with the benefit of elocution classes and an upright piano,” Giddins wrote.

Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School and attended Gonzaga University, where he found he liked music and partying more than books. One of his nicknames was “Binge” Crosby.

When he performed in the Gonzaga Dramatic Club’s play, “It Pays to Advertise” on Nov. 8, 1923, the 20-year-old Crosby got good reviews.

“Mr. Crosby bursts over with spontaneity in getting his amusing lines across the footlights,” The Spokesman-Review wrote.

Crosby died in 1977 and is buried in Culver City, Calif.

Bing Crosby trivia

* He was the first performer to receive Oscar nominations for the same role in two different films: as Father O’Malley in “Going My Way” (1944 – he won) and again in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945).

* From 1944 to 1948, he was five times the top moneymaking star at the box office in Quigley Publications’ annual poll of movie exhibitors, a record later equaled by Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds and then surpassed by Tom Cruise, who has been tops six times.

* At the time of his death in 1977, he was the biggest selling recording artist of all time.

* He is one of only five actors to have a No. 1 single and an Oscar for best actor or actress. The others are Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Cher and Jamie Foxx.

* He received 23 gold records and was awarded platinum discs for his two biggest selling singles, “White Christmas” in 1960 and “Silent Night” in 1970.

* According to the Guinness Book of Records, Crosby’s “White Christmas” has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

* According to ticket sales, Crosby is, at 1,077,900,000 tickets sold, the third-most popular actor, after Clark Gable and John Wayne.

* He was the first choice of “Columbo” creators Richard Levinson and William Link to portray the famed detective, but he didn’t want to take time from his golf game.

* He is estimated to have sold between 500 million and 900 million records worldwide. Most of the sales were singles.

* Four songs Crosby sang in movies – “Sweet Leilani” (1937), “White Christmas” (1942), “Swinging on a Star” (1944), and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (1951) – won Oscars.

* His recording of “White Christmas” became the best-selling single for more than 50 years, until it was overtaken in 1997 by “Candle in the Wind”, Elton John’s tribute to the late Princess Diana.