Bing Crosby Read Online Free

hagiographers because the facts are so much more impressive than the prejudices and myths on either side. Bing Crosby
     was, after all, a poor boy from a Catholic working-class district in turn-of-the-century Spokane who caught the attention
     of the world and made it better. “Call me lucky,” he said. But it was never just luck or even talent. It was also the determination
     and brains of an alert young man who came along when American entertainment was at a crossroads. He showed it which road to
     take.

1

THE HARRIGANS
    With a mother named Harrigan, you are Irish, I take it?
    — Ken Carpenter,
Kraft Music Hall
(1945) 1
    Late in the spring of 1831, Bing Crosby’s maternal great-grandfather, Dennis Harrigan, a fifty-one-year-old farmer and carpenter
     who lived in Schull parish, in the southwestern region of County Cork, Ireland, ushered his family aboard a timber ship bound
     for New Brunswick, Canada. 2 Leading his wife, Catherine, 3 and nine of their ten children onto the creaking deck, Dennis knew what to expect of the grueling voyage. Still, he counted
     himself lucky, for few members of his congregation were able to leave at all. Of the 65,000 emigrants who set sail in 1831,
     only ninety or so from tiny Schull could afford passage, not many of them Catholic. 4 A brave, resolute lot, they gazed westward with tenacious faith as the ship cleared Ireland’s southernmost point, the Mizen
     Head of southwest Cork’s Mizen peninsula, once a haven for smugglers and pirates who sought refuge in its impregnable coves.
    The Canadian-built vessels were designed not for carrying passengers but for transporting timber, New Brunswick’s primary
     export. To maximize efficiency, the shipbuilders hastily modified the holds and lowered passenger fares by more than two-thirds,
     allowing greater numbers of Irish families to emigrate and generating the slogan“timber in, passengers out.” Dozens of those ships were lost at sea, and many more were decimated by typhus, dysentery, and
     other diseases. All were cursed with conditions as barbarous as those of slave ships: insufficient food supplies, inadequate
     sanitation and gender partition, little if any ventilation, berths half as high as those required by law for slavers. The
     journey averaged six weeks, and the only music heard was the shrill wail of unceasing lamentations.
    The wilderness of Canada’s eastern provinces promised to be friendlier to the Harrigans. Dennis’s siblings had brought over
     their families the previous year. Now Dennis removed his own family (all but his married daughter, Ellen Sauntry, who arrived
     in New Brunswick twenty years later as a widow with seven children), fourteen years before the Great Hunger and before the
     tidal wave of Irish immigration that flooded America’s urban centers. His smaller generation of immigrants would explore and
     prosper in rural America, migrating from the Northeast to the Midwest to the Northwest, building successful farm communities
     with the logging skills they learned in the Canadian woods. The names of Mizen peninsula’s Catholic congregants who left that
     season and in harder ones to follow took root all across America: Fitzgerald, Driscoll, Reagan, Harrigan, Sullivan, Donovan,
     Coughlin, O’Brien, Hickey, Mahoney.
    They had abandoned a hellish place.
    A hundred years had passed since Jonathan Swift offered his “modest proposal” to abate Ireland’s poverty, beggary, and congestion
     by cannibalizing its “Popish” offspring. “A most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked
     or broiled,” he advised, “a delicacy befitting landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to
     have best title to the children.” 5 Ireland, cherishing its brood not least as a defense against the privations of old age, tripled its population in the decades
     after Swift.
    But congestion was not the foremost source of Ireland’s sorrows. The nefarious