Bing’s Day: Mary Crosby to visit Spokane for Sprague renaming

One hundred years ago, a 22-year-old Bing Crosby and his bandmate Al Rinker loaded up a 1916 Model T and hit the road for Hollywood from their hometown of Spokane.

This weekend, Spokane is celebrating Crosby’s embarkment with a two-day celebration, complete with a permanent renaming of a section of Sprague Avenue to “Bing Crosby Way” and a live re-enactment of the pair of musicians packing up a 1916 Model T. For the first time since the ’60s, Bing’s daughter, Mary Crosby, will be coming to town as well.

“I’ll probably just say ‘We’re so happy to be here’ and ‘Thank you,’ because really, what else is there to say?” Mary Crosby said. “This was Dad’s hometown, he loved it dearly, and as a family, we’re incredibly honored that Spokane would choose to celebrate him.”

After leaving Spokane in 1925, Bing Crosby hit it big. He became one of the most recorded voices in the world, releasing over 40 No. 1 records and what remains today as the best-selling single ever released: “White Christmas.”

“If you listen to any of Bing’s performances or his radio shows, he will mention Spokane very often and always with gratitude and with respect and with happiness,” Bing Crosby Advocates member and children’s author Lauren Harris said, adding that he had a house in Hayden Lake and visited his hometown several times. “He really did appreciate Spokane, so it’s only fitting that Spokane would then appreciate him and his accomplishments and his contributions really to what we enjoy today.”

Oct. 10 will be declared “Bing’s Day” by Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown at the Sprague naming event on Friday, which will see around two blocks of the avenue affixed with lilac signs underneath existing street markers. Addresses along the strip will remain unchanged. The Symon building, where Crosby was known to perform live for the radio from the second floor, will also be getting a plaque in the morning.

Harris called the event historic.

“This is very exciting, ’cause there are other towns that have streets named after Bing Crosby, but there has never been any section of any street that’s been named for him (in Spokane),” she said. “So this is really wonderful, and it’s on the street where he got his first start as an entertainer, across at the Bing Crosby theater – that was when it was the Clemmer Theater.”

Moving to Spokane at just 3 years old, Crosby grew up in what is now the Bing Crosby House Museum on Gonzaga University’s campus. He attended both Gonzaga Preparatory School and Gonzaga University as a teen and young adult, eventually dropping out of university to pursue music. He performed with Rinker, a North Central High School graduate, at the Clemmer Theater for around two months before the pair left for Hollywood.

“He is the most recorded voice in history, but a lot of people don’t really know what he was like,” Harris said.

But Mary Crosby certainly does.

Born in Los Angeles and growing up just outside of San Francisco, Mary Crosby remembers hunting, fishing and playing baseball with her father growing up.

“That was just perfect for me, ’cause I’m a hopeless tomboy, so he basically treated me like one of the guys, and I loved it,” she said, laughing.

Mary Crosby; her husband, Mark; her two children, Benjamin, 26, and Christopher, 23; and her daughter-in-law, Kyoko, are coming to Spokane to celebrate the street being named after Crosby.

“It’s just such a joy for us to celebrate the fact that Dad is being honored in Spokane,” she said. “We’re all very excited to be together, celebrate Dad and get to know Spokane out of it.”

Though Bing Crosby spoke highly of his childhood in Spokane to her growing up – “it was a part of his world,” Mary Crosby said – she hasn’t been to the city since her Dad visited with her as a child in 1968.

“We’re going to see Gonzaga,” she said. “Dad supported it and loved it his entire life, and so it’s nice that we get to see that too.”

On Saturday, Harris will be giving an introduction of her newest children’s book, “Bing Himself: The Story of Bing Crosby, the World’s First Multimedia Star,” at the Crosby house. Though digestible enough for kids, Harris said that the book can be for anyone interested in learning about Bing Crosby’s life but not up for reading a whole novel.

“I think it’s a lovely depiction of Dad for children, which is great because it takes it into the next generation,” Mary Crosby said.

Bing Crosby is responsible for “shaping culture” in a number of areas, Harris said, including in singing style, actor pay equality and audio recording technology.

“That’s why this is so exciting for me, because there are kids out there that will do things that we don’t know they’re going to do, and maybe this will inspire them to kind of reach for their dreams and to take what they’re good at and make it,” she said.

Connecting kids with local history is important, Harris said.

“This is for the families of Spokane to just remember somebody who grew up here and appreciated Spokane and appreciated that he got his start here,” Harris said. “It’s a once in a lifetime to come down and celebrate together and to see history continue on and continue Bing’s legacy together.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Lauren Harris’s name.