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and in 1949 thedeed was given to the local chapter of Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington in return for its restoration and preservation. 13 Bing contributed $1,800 toward the purchase and gave the Daughters two chairs his grandparents had owned when they lived
     in the house.) Nat and Cordelia raised two sons. Frank Lawrence, born in Tumwater in 1862, made a name for himself in the
     Puget Sound area as U.S. deputy marshall residing in Tacoma, thirty miles northeast; his brother, Harry Lowe, born in Olympia
     on November 28, 1870, developed a less exacting attitude toward life.
    Given the eight-and-a-half-year gap between the births of Frank and Harry, each may be said to have been raised virtually
     as an only child, but it was the younger who became a provincial dandy. Pampered by servants throughout his childhood, Harry
     was by all accounts a guileless young man, lighthearted and informal, unburdened by ambition, hail-fellow-well-met — in short,
     a model for the character Bing Crosby would bring to movies in the 1930s. He was appealing in a ruddy, moonfaced way, favoring
     broad suspenders and a rakishly tilted straw hat, and he loved music. Accompanying himself on mandolin or a four-string guitar,
     Harry sang old favorites made popular by roving minstrel troupes, newer novelty songs and ballads, Chinese ditties learned
     from the Asian servants his mother had brought home from the Orient, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Mikado
was the rage of the 1890s, and a cousin of Harry’s, Sam Woodruff, famously toured the Northwest as Koko.
    Harry sang with an Olympia-based men’s choir, the Peep-O’-Day Boys, and played in the city’s silver cornet band at about the
     time Kate Harrigan was singing in a Tacoma church choir. In 1890, after dropping out of college, Harry moved to Tacoma, where
     Frank lived, and found work as a bookkeeper for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s Land Department. For three years he lived
     in a string of hotels and rooming houses, but his bachelor days were numbered when he encountered the stabilizing glint-eyed
     gaze of Miss Harrigan appearing in a department-store theatrical.
    From the first, they seemed oddly matched, a devout Catholic courted by a casual Protestant. Kate was a willful, disciplined
     young woman who distrusted luck and abhorred sloth. Harry was incapable of raising his voice and trusted less to Providence
     or God than togoodwill and serendipity. In time, she would come to be characterized as humorless, even autocratic. He never lost the epithet
     earned as a young man, Happy Harry — though it was amended much later to Hollywood Harry. The women employed in Bing Crosby’s
     offices were more bemused than offended by Dad Crosby’s fanny-pinching, in light of Mother Crosby’s temperament, which brought
     everyone, including her sons, to solemn attention.
    Music may have sealed their courtship, but Harry’s willingness to convert to Catholicism made possible their marriage. He
     established a standard other non-Catholics would be expected to uphold as a precondition to marrying into the family. The
     wedding took place in a small wooden church, Holy Rosary, on January 4, 1894, and the couple moved directly into the hotel
     — St. John House — in which Harry boarded. Within weeks they acquired their first of several houses in the alphabetically
     configured city. Located in the “backwoods” area of N Street, 14 this house came to Kate’s mind fifty years later when a writer solicited her Mother’s Day recollections. “One of my warmest
     Mother’s Day memories goes back to before the children were even born,” she said, “back to the day when their father and I
     knew we had established a home for them, a place warm and livable, and I could close my eyes and imagine them there.” 15

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TACOMA
    There are literally millions of Crosby relatives around these parts.
    — Burt McMurtrie, columnist (1948) 1
    Kate Crosby wouldn’t have to imagine for long. She