By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

We have a reliable eyewitness willing to testify that the lei contest for tomorrow's Lei Day Festival at Kapi'olani Park will be much livelier than those of 50 years ago. Understand, this is a dangerous statement to make to any tutu on the sunny side of 70.

However, on the 75th anniversary of Lei Day, we might as well pull out all the stops. Our eyewitness, Leilani Keppeler-Bortles, would have been born on Lei Day 1940 except that her mother was busy dressing the queen.

Leilani was due on Lei Day but graciously waited until her mother had time to go to the hospital. She has attended every Lei Day since.

"The leis on display are much more creative now," said the Queen Emma Summer Palace administrator. "What people are doing with leis is more original than the traditional leis on display when I was a girl."

Leilani is a gold mine of information about Lei Day, because she was in on the ground floor. Poet Don Blanding gets credit for coming up with the idea. But it took a lot of other people to make it work, many of them related, like Leilani's mother and Eben Low.

It was Low, the legendary paniolo, who got Doris Mossman Keppeler involved in Hawaiian pageants about 1926. "My mother was a counselor at McKinley High School," said Leilani. "She also ran the Lei Day Pageant for the City & County, the Kamehameha Day parade, and organized pa'u riders for the Aloha Week parade.

"She not only produced pageants but wrote them, too. My mother put on the Punahou Centennial Pageant."

Leilani told me something else you don't know. Guess who spark-plugged the Punahou Lei Day pageant that has become so popular you can't get in without a ticket? Ex-coach Dave Eldredge.

Here's some more trivia:

• The first Lei Day queen, Nina Bowman, wore a bodice of flowers, a ti leaf skirt and a train of bougainvillaea.
• The Lei Day queen and her court used to visit seamstress Aunty Bella's house in Pauoa Valley to be fitted for gowns. There was always a pot of Portuguese bean soup on the stove.
• Doris Keppeler saw to it that the Lei Day queen was the most beautiful high school girl she could find. Today the queen is selected mostly from civic organizations and hula halau, because she needs a lot of support.

The halau of this year's queen, Erica Ann Sacatropez, is providing her with one chanter, four kahili bearers, two spear bearers and one pu'olu'olu, or tabu stick bearer, for her installation on the bandstand in Kapi'olani Park at 11 a.m. tomorrow.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.