b'Left: Kathryn with her legendary husband, Bing Crosby; Above: In promotional photo for book tour.Robstownian Kathryn Grandstaff Crosby Passes Away at Age 90Former Corpus Christi Splash Days Princess lived an amazing life of Hollywood royalty.Corpus Christis annual community festival was known as Splash Days for decades, be-fore it was renamed and re-themed to Buccaneer Days (today known as Buc Days), in 1938. At the tender age of three, under the care of her aunt and uncle, Frances and Leon Sullivan of Robstown, Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was entered into the 1937 Splash Days Princess beauty contest for toddlers, which she won going away. Delbert Grandstaff was a Marine Corps veteran who fought bravely in World War I, returning home to Humble, Texas, to marry his high school sweetheart, Olive Stockley.The couple became educators and settled in West Columbia, at the heart of Brazoria County, northeast of Bay City and directly inland from Freeport. Olive taught second grade and Dilbert history at the high school, where he coached the mighty Rough-necks to a state football championship. Olive Kathryn was born on November 25, 1933, in West Columbia, but for reasons that are not publicly known, spent much of her child-hood under the care of the Sullivans in Robstown, where she graduated high school in 1951. Kathryn did well on the beauty pageant tour, being named Queen of the Texas Baseball League and the Houston Fat Stock Showa description, one would assume, that applied to the cattle and not the beauty contestants.At the 1950 Miss Texas Pageant in Galveston, Kathryn earned second place, but the event that would change her life was her discovery by a Hollywood talent agent. In her years after high school, she managed to launch her show business career while earning a degree in Fine Arts from UT Austin. Acting under the stage name Kathryn Grant, she costarred with the biggest stars of the time including Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Jimmy Stewartbut it was her side gig as writer of the newspaper column, A Texas Gal in Hollywood, that led to her instant ascension into Hollywood royalty. After interview-ing Bing Crosby on the set of the classic holiday film, White Christmas, the two began dating publicly, even attending the 1955 Oscars, where Crosby lost out to Marlon Bran-do for the Best Actor award.Bing Crosby was the biggest entertainer in the world, at the time. His recording of White Christmas is, still, the best selling record in history, accounting for 50 million of Crosbys 500 million worldwide records salesBing was dubbed the original crooner. 68THECOASTALBENDMAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com'