Free Bing Crosby by Gary Giddins Page A

when he was ill nor attended his funeral. As an adult, Bing demonstrated a categorical
     aversion to funerals, memorial services, and hospitals.
    Bing’s skill as a young athlete was as obvious as his musical talent. Too small to make much of an impression in basketball
     or football, he was game enough to try hard at both as well as boxing and handball. He excelled in baseball and made the Junior
     Yard Association and varsity teams year after year, first at third base, then center field. He occasionally fantasized about
     running off to play professionally, and for a season played semipro on a team sponsored by Spokane Ideal Laundry. In his movies
     he would often incorporate bits of business to display his agility with a ball, though the closest he came to realizing his
     pro ambitions was buying a piece of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1946.
    Bing was even better at swimming. He learned the hard way. McGoldrick’s lumberyard inhabited a portion of the northern bank
     of the Spokane River, which was close enough to the Gonzaga complex to disrupt classes with noise and smoke. In the years
     before the city created a network of public swimming pools, the millpond at the river’s bend, bordered by a sandbar and accessed
     by logs dumped there for storage, was a deadly lure to neighborhood kids. Some drowned trying to brave the swift rapids beyond
     the sandbar; many more died trying to walk the log booms to and from the pond. Forbidden from going anywhere near McGoldrick’s,
     the Boone gang and others could not resist the challenge.
    The boys — Bing and Ted, Frank Corkery and his older brother, Boots, Ralph Foley, Phil Sweeney and his brother, Dan, and half
     a dozen others — were clustered in the family barn of one of its members when Foley (later a superior court judge and the
     father of the Speaker of the House Tom Foley) challenged them to join him for a swim in the millpond. They walked south on
     Standard Street, pastGonzaga and the vacant lots and the railroad tracks, until they reached the narrow sandbar and saw older boys, including Everett,
     cavorting in the middle of the river. Despite warnings from passersby and the swimmers, they gingerly crossed a cluster of
     logs, disrobed, and jumped in. During that first adventure, Bing and Ted were painfully sunburned. They managed to hide their
     discomfort at lunch, but their vocal suffering alerted Kate that night. She insisted, in vain, that Harry whip them, but she
     soon took pity and applied a reeking goose grease to their inflamed backs.
    As Corkery recalled, Bing was a millpond regular, swimming naked with the others and shocking passengers on the trains that
     rolled by the log-boom platforms from which they dove. He learned to swim in those currents and revisited them long after
     the pool at Mission Park opened, six blocks from his home. Jimmy Cottrell swam with Bing at Mission Park but, like him, preferred
     the excitement of the river: “Bing was a good diver, I admired him. We used to sneak off together to the Spokane River and
     see who could swim across.” 38 Another admirer of Bing’s watery talents was Mary Sholderer, one of seven girls in a gregarious and generous German family
     that fed and looked after the Crosby kids. (“We spent about as much time in the Sholderers’ home as we did in our own,” Bing
     said.) 39 She would not venture to McGoldrick’s but sometimes walked Bing to the Mission pool, carrying Bob in her arms. She watched
     him dive and swim, and praised his agility. Mary sang soprano at St. Aloysius and, with three of her sisters, grew old in
     the family house. The beloved spinsters became known for the birthday parties they threw for neighborhood dogs. Bing never
     forgot Mary’s kindness or failed to visit the Sholderer home when he returned to Spokane.
    From Mary and the other kids, Kate learned how well Bing handled himself in the water. In the summer of 1915 he was hired
     as towel boy for the Mission Park pool