Getting There: Should Bing Crosby get his Way in downtown SPokane?

SPOKANE — Mention the name Bing Crosby, and snowflakes fall. Sugarplum fairies dance. Sleigh bells ring.

But following a new effort by some local Bing enthusiasts, his name may remind you of more than the holidays. By renaming a portion of Sprague Avenue after Crosby, the Advocates for Bing Crosby think the famous 20th-century crooner will make people think of Spokane’s growing theater and entertainment district.

“We’ve got this tremendous name in national history,” said Bill Stimson, president of the group and a journalism professor at Eastern Washington University. “Anybody in the country would crave to have that name put on their theater district.”

The group is pushing an effort to rename Sprague Avenue – rife with live entertainment venues and locales that cater to the late crowd between Division and Browne’s Addition – as “Bing Crosby Way.”

It makes some sense, considering how Crosby spent his last years as a Gonzaga University student on the street, playing music and carousing with his friends. Stimson said the street is emblematic of Crosby’s rise before his fateful road trip to Los Angeles, the city that shot him quickly to stardom.

Whitehead’s Dancing Palace, which opened on Christmas Eve 1919, drew a young Crosby to its location on Sprague just east of Washington Street. There, he would avoid the dance floor and focus his attention on the band, especially the drummer, as they played songs for the waltz, foxtrot and the Charleston. The building still exists, but is now used as a parking garage.

Before and after the shows, Crosby would hang out at a tobacco and candy shop on Sprague and Wall Street run by a man named Benny Stubek. During Prohibition in the basement of the building, where the Bank of America building currently stands, the college-aged Bing and his friends would occasionally get “drunker’n skunks on moonshine,” Stubek said according to a book about Crosby’s early years, looking for girls, fights and a game of pool.

Crosby, though, also had ambition. At the time, the Symons Block, at the corner of Sprague and Howard Street, was home to one of the city’s first radio stations, KFDC, which would later become KXLY. As a young, unknown musician, Crosby tried unsuccessfully to get on the air.

“Bing knew people who went on the radio there, but he couldn’t get in,” Stimson said. Not at first anyway. After achieving fame, Crosby would drive downtown from his home on Idaho’s Hayden Lake and record his songs in the radio station’s studios.

“He’d be carrying his black satchel with his favorite microphone in it,” Stimson said. To this day, Crosby’s recording credits contain a discordant listing of locations: New York, Los Angeles, London.

And Spokane.

Symons still stands, home to the Observatory bar and music venue.

Before he left town for the big time, Crosby cut his chops at the 800-seat Clemmer Theater, a movie house at the corner of Sprague and Lincoln. A manager there had decided to drum up interest by hiring live acts between films, and Crosby played there for six months. The theater also still stands, and is now known as the Bing Crosby Theater.

When Crosby finally packed his bags in 1925 and left for California with his performing partner, Al Rinker, in his 1916 Ford Model T, he departed on the Sunset Highway – which incidentally ran through downtown Spokane on, you guessed it, Sprague.

So next time you hear ” White Christmas,” “Silver Bells” or “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” – all tunes originally recorded by Crosby, or forever linked to him – think of the time Spokane’s favorite crooner spent on Sprague.

Or is it Bing Crosby Way?