kathryn crosby history bermuda run golf tournament

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Tim Clodfelter

Editor's note: This article was first published May 21, 2008.

Seven years after the Crosby National Celebrity Golf Tournament came to an end, North Carolina is still part of Kathryn Crosby's life.

"The people here are the reason I came here in the first place," she said.

Crosby, 74, the widow of entertainer Bing Crosby, lives in Genoa, Nev. But she was in Winston-Salem yesterday and Monday to attend the Crosby Scholars golf tournament. The tournament, which took place yesterday at Bermuda Run, raises money for the Crosby Scholars Community Partnership, a nonprofit organization that started as an offshoot of the charity golf tournament.

Bing Crosby, an avid golfer, founded the Crosby celebrity tournament in California in 1937. In 1986, Kathryn Crosby said that the California tournament was too commercialized and not focused enough on raising money for charity. She brought it to Bermuda Run, and it continued here until 2001, when dwindling attendance and difficulty finding sponsors led to its end.

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Crosby continues to come here yearly to support Crosby Scholars, which helps more than 4,000 middle- and high-school students prepare for college each year.

"This is a firm commitment," Crosby said.

"It's extremely important to have her come in every year and support the program," said Mona Lovett, the executive director of Crosby Scholars. "The community has benefited greatly from her generosity and her involvement…. She could just say ‘good wishes' from New York, Genoa or wherever she may be."

Next week, Kathryn Crosby will fly to Burbank for a Hope and Crosby reunion -- she will attend the 99th birthday celebration for Dolores Hope, the widow of Bing Crosby's comedy partner Bob Hope.

Crosby travels at least once a month, but still finds time to pursue other interests, including painting and performing a one-woman show.

"I wrote a cabaret about my life with Bing and how we met and our courtship, which was very rocky, and our marriage," she said. She sings and tells stories from their life in the show, which she has performed in New York and Los Angeles. This Christmas, she will perform the cabaret again in New York, and hopes for a good turnout.

"If Winston-Salem would just move north for a day or two," she said with a laugh. "It's fun to have people sing along with me."

She has been pleased to see the revival of Bing Crosby's old films on DVD. "There's a great deal of interest in Bing," she said. "Suddenly in America I think it's good to be a nice guy, and he was that. There were a number of years when you had to be a swinger or work in Vegas a lot. But Bing never did work in Vegas because his mother wouldn't have liked it."

■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.

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