LINDSAY CROSBY: POOF IT'S GONE

Here is an interesting blog article I found. Some different info in it...

The youngest of crooner Bing Crosby's four sons by his marriage to jazz singer Dixie Lee (real name Wilma Wyatt) was born in Los Angeles on January 5, 1938. Lindsay first appeared on film with brothers Gary, Dennis, and Phillip as audience members in the 1945 movie Out of This Worldf featuring his famous father. In 1957, he made his television debut on The Edsel Show with his father and Frank Sinatra. A nightclub act with his three brothers called the Crosby Boys ran until 1959. Never steadily employed, Lindsay read scripts for his father while trying to carve out a place for himself in films. However, he only managed to land bit parts in low-budget biker, exploitation, and horror films like The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966), The Glory Stompers (1967), Scream Free! a.k.a. Free Grass (1969), and Bigfoot (1970). He also briefly appeared in two seventies films (The Mechanic; Live a Little, Steal a Lot,1972) before making his final film, Code Name: Zebra in 1984.

Lindsay was 14 when his mother died in 1952. A trust fund set up by Dixie Lee based on then booming oil investments yielded each of the boys a monthly four figure check. Big Crosby married actress Kathryn Grant in 1957 and the 73 year old was happily raising a second family when he died of a heart attack on October 14, 1977, on a golf course in Madrid, Spain. If Der Bingle's sons were expecting to immediately inherit chunks of their father's considerable fortune they were soon disappointed. Perhaps he knew them too well. Lindsay, like older brother Gary, was an alcoholic and manic depressive who had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1962. In addition to several arrests for drunken driving and battery, Lindsay had also logged an arrest for indecent exposure in Durango, Colorado, in 1977 for running naked around a motel pool. The boys were shocked when they learned their father had left them money in a blind trust that could not be touched until they reached age 65.

On December 1, 1989, attorneys managing Dixie Lee's trust fund informed the brothers that the recent glut in the world's oil markets had wiped out their investments. Eleven days after learning that there would be no more monthly checks forthcoming, Lindsay Crosby took his life on December 11, 1989.

The 51 year old was staying in an apartment in Las Virgenes in the 26300 block of Bravo Lane while undergoing treatment for alcoholism at a center in nearby Calabasas, California. Crosby was set to return home for the weekend to his second wife and family in Sherman Oaks when a friend found him on the floor of his den dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. A small caliber rifle lay close by. Marilyn Riess, spokeswoman for Lindsay's older brother, Gary, offered this explanation for the act: "You're dealing with a 51-year-old man who finds himself with a wife and four kids living in a fairly expensive home. He's under treatment for alcoholism, he's a manic depressive and then you throw a bomb at him. The one thing he could depend on was his mother, even when she wasn't alive. Then it (the inheritance) was gone....Poof, it's gone." Older brother Dennis Crosby took his life in an eerily similar fashion on May 4, 1991...

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100TH ANNIVERSARY OF BING'S BOYHOOD HOME

Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Bing Crosby's Boyhood Home, 508 E. Sharp Ave., Saturday, October 26, 2013; 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. To celebrate this home's 100th anniversary, the Advocates of the Bing Crosby Theater will be hosting an open house and cake during Gonzaga's Fall Family Weekend.

This event is free and open to the public. In July 1913, Harry and Catherine Crosby moved with their six children (No. 7 on the way) into the nine-room, two-story home, Bing Crosby's father, had the house built to accommodate his large family. Catherine had purchased the property for $1 from the Pioneer Educational Society, a Jesuit organization that owned much land around Gonzaga. Numerous Catholic families built their homes in this neighborhood, which became known as "the Holy Land" or "the Little Vatican."

The house served as the Crosby family's home for 23 years, including when Bing attended Gonzaga High School and Gonzaga University (1914-24). The C. P. Higgins family purchased the home from the Crosby family in 1936 for $3,600, and owned it until 1978. The Gonzaga Alumni Association purchased the house in 1980. The Crosby Alumni House was used for alumni events with staff offices upstairs unitl 2010, when the Alumni Association moved to the Heutter Mansion across the street. Afterwards, the Crosby House was used for office space for a couple of departments.

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THE EARLY LIFE OF BING

Bing Crosby first appeared in the wide world of entertainment in the mid 1920s. Fans are used to seeing Bing as the carefree crooner on the radio and movies or maybe in later years as the elder statesman of crooning. However, as hard as it is to believe, Bing at one time was a child. Before he became Bing Crosby entertainer - he was Harry Lillis Crosby from Washington State!

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington on May 3, 1903 in a house that his father built (1112 North J Street, Tacoma, Washington). His family later moved to Spokane, Washington in 1906 to find work. He was the fourth of seven children - five boys Larry (1895-1975), Everett (1896-1966), Ted (1900-1973) and Bob (1913-1993) and two girls Catherine (1904-1988) and Mary Rose (1906-90) - born to English-American Harry Lowe Crosby (1871-1950), a bookkeeper, and Irish-American Catherine Harrigan (1873-1964), the daughter of a builder from County Mayo in Ireland. For many years his date of birth was shrouded in mystery until his childhood Roman Catholic church in Tacoma, Washington, released his baptismal records.

In 1910 Crosby was forever renamed. The six-year-old Harry Lillis Crosby discovered a full page feature in the Sunday edition of Spokesman-Review, The Bingville Bugle. The Bugle, written by humorist Newton Newkirk, was a parody of a hillbilly newsletter complete with gossipy tidbits, minstrel quips, creative spelling and mock ads. A neighbor, 15-year-old Valentine Hobart, shared Crosby's enthusiasm for The Bugle. Noting Crosby's laugh, she took a liking to him and called him Bingo from Bingville. The last vowel was dropped and the name shortened to Bing, which stuck.

In 1917 Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's "Auditorium" where he witnessed some of the finest acts of the day, including a blackface performer named Al Jolson who spellbound Crosby with his ad-libbing and spoofs of Hawaiian songs that brought down the house. Crosby would later say that, "To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived."

Bing enrolled in Gonzaga College in the fall of 1920 with the intent to become a lawyer. While in Gonzaga he sent away for a set of mail order drums. After much practice he soon became good enough and was invited to join a local band called the "Musicaladers" which was mostly made up of local high school kids. He made so much money doing this he decided to drop out of school during his final year, to pursue a career in show business...and as they say the rest is history!

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