It's fitting that the 1950 Rodeo Queen of the Houston Fat Stock Show and Exposition will be this year's grand marshal for the 2008 Nevada Day Parade. The theme is Hollywood in Nevada.
"I think it's quite right that I should be grand marshal of Nevada Day. I'm thrilled to death to get to be there," said Kathryn Crosby.
From her Genoa home on Monday, a vibrant Kathryn Crosby is the epitome of the Hollywood of days gone by. Hers was a bygone era where studio contracts kept the talent tame and glamour was abundant.
Now, 31 years after her husband, King of Hollywood Bing Crosby's passing, Kathryn is elegant, engaging, gracious and oozing of charm just as Paramount Studios would have expected when she was under contract with them in the 50s.
A starlet in her own right, she appeared in more than three dozen movies and television shows, before settling down with the crooner whose voice was as smooth when he spoke as when he sang, she said.
It was the smooth voice of a 50-year-old star that wooed the 19-year-old beauty as she crossed the Paramount backlot.
"Hey Tex, what's your hurry," Bing said to a blushing Kathryn.
"I just thought he was kind of wonderful," she recalled. "He talked exactly the way he sang."
Kathryn, Bing and the couple's three children, Mary, Harry and Nathaniel, all took part in an annual Christmas show for television from 1966 to 1977. In 1977 Bing and David Bowie performed Little Drummer Boy which today's generation may have seen on MTV and VH1 during the holidays. The program was prerecorded in September and Bing died in October of that year before it aired.
After a stint on Broadway with State Fair and trying her hand at as a television host, Kathryn, 74, recently has been performing a cabaret show about Bing.
She performs "wherever they will have me," she said, with shows scheduled for Baton Rouge next month and San Diego and New York in December.
Though she's lived in Nevada since 1986, and owns 4,000 acres in Stagecoach, Kathryn has never attended the Nevada Day Parade, but said she is looking forward to the adventure.
"I understand it's a lot of people like Candy Dance," she said, smiling widely.
Contact reporter F.T. Norton at ftnorton@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1213.