By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Bird-call guru Martin Denny owns an autographed first edition of Don Blanding's poems, "Joy Is an Inside Job." Much more interesting is the letter from Blanding inside it, written a year before he died. That's the story we'll tell today.

Before Denny made his bird-call records and was just a nightclub piano player, he used to take the sun with poet Blanding on Waikiki Beach between the Moana Hotel and the old Outrigger Canoe Club. Blanding was then Hawai'i's best-selling writer who had invented Lei Day.

"This was about 1954," said Denny. "Don was a salty character, a virile looking man, tall and blond. He used to tell me stories, most of them not fit to print. Blanding traveled a lot on the lecture circuit. He also had bladder problems.

"One time he was giving a talk to a women's club when he had to empty his bladder. He was behind a podium between two potted palms. Little by little, he inched a palm closer and, without dropping a comma, relieved himself during the lecture.

"The only person who noticed was the custodian. Don said the custodian told him afterwards, 'I've never seen anybody do that with such finesse.'"

This isn't the image that comes across in Blanding's sentimental, self-illustrated books of poetry, "Vagabond House," "Hula Moon," "Songs of the Seven Seas," etc.

A critic wrote, "He was not a great poet and artist in the sense of Michelangelo and Walt Whitman, yet he gave unique expression to life in Hawai'i as it was in the 1920s and 1930s."

I was never sure that Blanding's vagabond adventures were real. The story goes that some were invented by a female publicist who fell in love with him in New York. She dropped items in gossip columns like: "Don Blanding met an old wartime pal with whom he had flown wing and wing until his friend went down in flames over France. ... The door knocker on Don Blanding's apartment was the stirrup of the saddle he used when he was a warlord in China."

So I was delighted to see the true Don Blanding emerge in the letter that's tucked into Martin Denny's book. The letter is dated 1956.

That's when Denny made his first, blockbuster recording, titled "Exotica," that sold 300,000 long-play records. Until that time, of course, he was unknown. So he wrote and asked his friend, Don Blanding in Hollywood, to write the liner notes for the jacket. Blanding refused.

"I can't do that kind of crap," he wrote, "but it's the only kind that's being used. The public taste is so numbed by shock and television sandpapering that the nerve ends have to be scraped with shark's teeth to get a reaction. I'm giving you serious advice even if frivolously presented."

Denny's later albums bore liner notes by James Michener, Walter Winchell, Ferde Grofe, John Sturges and Louella Parsons.

But not Blanding.