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was expecting when she and Harry moved into the house at 616 South N Street.
     On the third day of the New Year, 1895, Laurence Earl was born at home. Before the year was out, they moved to a better neighborhood,
     near Wright Park, and a bigger house to accommodate Harry’s mother, Cordelia, who lived with them for a few months. In that
     house, at 110 North Yakima, a second son, Everett Nathaniel, was born on April 5, 1896. The family’s fortunes changed when
     Harry lost his job with the Northern Pacific and was forced to scuffle for work through the depression years of 1897 and 1898.
     His plight may account for the four-year pause before more children arrived. The Crosbys moved twice more, never beyond the
     radius of a few blocks in the residential district just north of downtown Tacoma.
    Harry’s luck changed in 1899, when he was hired as a clerk in the Pierce County treasurer’s office, under Treasurer Stephen
     Judson, who had been one of the Washington pioneers of the 1850s. 2 The family was now able to rent a handsome three-story, many-gabled corner house at 922 North I Street, where their third
     son, Edward John,was born on July 30, 1900. Judson was defeated in the Republican sweep of 1902, but his successor, John B. Reed, promoted
     Harry to bookkeeper. That December Harry celebrated his good fortune by purchasing, for $850, two adjoining lots on J Street,
     between North Eleventh and North Twelfth, with the intention of building a residence he estimated would cost $2,500. 3 The deed was made out to his wife, who could never feel truly settled in a rental.
    Construction at 1112 North J was completed ten months later, in the first weeks of a cold winter. Set on a grassy incline
     from the street, the wooden two-story frame house had wide eaves and a large front porch with three sets of double columns
     supporting a roof porch just below the second-story bedroom windows. Harry and Kate permitted themselves the luxury of a piano.
     Down the street they could see Puget Sound, and only three blocks away stood St. Patrick’s, the small wooden church that had
     served the community for a dozen years and where Edward (Ted) was baptized.
    Kate was pregnant again during the construction, with a due date in mid-spring. As the day approached, the stinging April
     winds suddenly departed and she delivered her fourth son on Sunday, May 3, which the
Daily Ledger
declared AN IDEAL SUMMER DAY. 4
    Kate, who had just turned thirty, and Harry, finally established in the city’s middle class, decided that this boy’s arrival
     merited a public announcement. For the first time, they alerted the newspapers of a newborn. When the
Daily Ledger
failed to print the item in “City News in Brief” until May 5, implying with the word
yesterday
that the great event had taken place on May 4, 5 Kate stipulated the correct date for its rival, the
Tacoma Daily News
(“Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Crosby are receiving congratulations on the arrival of a son at their household May 3”), 6 and requested a correction from the
Ledger,
which appeared on May 7. 7
    On May 31, accompanied by Kate’s younger brother Frank and his wife (the boy’s godparents), Harry and Kate carried the infant
     to St. Patrick’s for his baptism. 8 Harry was disappointed at not having a girl, but Kate placated him by naming the boy after him. For his middle name, however,
     she chose Lillis, after a neighborhood friend, circumventing a generational ranking of senior and junior (though both Harrys
     would often use those designations). Happy Harry cradled theinfant in his arms, looked into blue eyes that would never darken, and gave forth in song, “Ten Baby Fingers and Ten Baby
     Toes.” 9
    For all the decisiveness with which May 3, 1903, was flagged as Harry Lillis Crosby’s birthday, the date proved controversial
     in and out of family circles. 10 In all official accounts (generated by Paramount, Decca, the Crosby offices, and, most insistently, Bing himself), it