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June and Bob Crosby achieved a mixed quartet. L. to r.: Robert Jr., Cathleen, Steven, Christopher.
By
BOB CROSBY
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Bing has to put a premium on time. He's got so many things to do, so many places to go, so many people to please. If he can't get understanding from a brother, where else could he turn?
Even at golf, Bing never knows where the next time-killing eventuality will come from. In the absence of his regular caddy, Bing drew a substitute at one of the Hollywood courses. Bing thought nothing of it until the fifth green when he called for an iron and got a song instead. A singing caddy!
Bing grinned, and waited the caddy's pleasure.
At the next hole, the caddy burst into song again. Bing waited tolerantly for him to finish, but the boy was just getting warmed up. •
"If you don't like that one," he told Bing, "I've got another one."
"Is it all right if we play golf between choruses?" Bing asked.
From then until the last hole, the club bearer clammed up. At the eighteenth green, he pleaded with Bing, "I have one more song. If you don't like it.
you don't have to pay me." Bing held up a hand — he wanted to know just one thing: "How long will it last?"
If he wasn't in a hurry, he just wouldn't be Bing.
I was a kid at the time, but I knew I had a great man for a brother when he was fresh — and unknown — out of Gonzaga, unable to choose between law and singing with a band. Nobody could listen to the family and doubt it.
I'm a big boy now, and I can do my own thinking. The proud chatter of my folks no longer falls on impressionable ears. But it doesn't matter. Even if I had never been indoctrinated as a youngster in Spokane, Washington, I'd realize it as every other American does.
My brother is a great man — and a great guy.
I confess to one regret in life. It is that I was born fourteen years after Bing. Those were fourteen years in which I could have had a ringside seat at the childhood of a cut-up destined for immortality, a troubador whom historians {Continued on page 95)
Bob Crosby is starred on Club 15, 7:30 P.M. EST, Mon. through Fri., on CBS.
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