He bankrolled tape so radio could be edited like film
After seeing a German reel-to-reel recorder that John T. Mullin brought to America, Bing Crosby put fifty thousand dollars into Ampex to build copies. He then convinced ABC to let him prerecord shows on magnetic tape—the first performer to treat radio with retakes, edits, and time-shifting the way movies already did.
Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. was born May 3, 1903, in Tacoma and raised in Spokane. A neighbor, Valentine Hobart, nicknamed him Bingo from Bingville after a comic feature he liked; Bingo shortened to Bing. He whistled more than he sang as a boy—a habit that stayed in songs including "White Christmas." After Gonzaga High School he spent three years at Gonzaga University without a degree, entertaining baseball teammates with a guitar on road trips he was not officially allowed to take. An honorary doctorate arrived in 1937.
With Al Rinker he reached Los Angeles in 1925, then joined Paul Whiteman's organization in 1926 at one hundred fifty dollars a week. Pianist Harry Barris completed The Rhythm Boys; Crosby's first number-one was a jazz-tinged "Ol' Man River" in 1928. Solo radio began September 2, 1931, with 15 Minutes with Bing Crosby, and he soon signed with Brunswick and CBS. Over a career spanning 1926 to 1977 he made more than seventy feature films and recorded over sixteen hundred songs, leading record sales, radio ratings, and movie grosses for decades. Yank magazine said he had done the most for overseas servicemen's morale in World War II; a 1948 Music Digest estimate held that his discs filled more than half of North America's eighty thousand weekly hours of recorded radio music.
He won the Best Actor Oscar for Going My Way (1944), topped the box office five years running from 1944 to 1948, and collected the first Grammy Global Achievement Award in 1963. Three Hollywood Walk of Fame stars cover film, radio, and recording. Beyond Ampex and radio tape, he helped finance videotape, owned racehorses, and co-owned the Pittsburgh Pirates during World Series wins in 1960 and 1971. He died October 14, 1977, having turned intimate microphone singing into a global template for the male crooner.
Source: Bing Crosby
