Don Blanding

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Donald Benson Blanding (November 7, 1894–June 9, 1957) was an American poet who sentimentalized warm climates and was sometimes described as "poet laureate of Hawaii". He was also known as a journalist, author of prose, illustrator, and speaker.

Blanding was born on November 7, 1894, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma (in the period as a territory prior to that state's creation). He trained between 1913 and 1915 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

He enlisted (for a year, or the duration of World War I plus up to six months) in the Canadian Army's predominantly American 97^th ("American Legion") Battalion, training with them for trench warfare for eight months in 1916, but leaving service under unknown circumstances a few days before the unit shipped out for Europe. (He omitted reference to that service and training a year later in joining the U.S. military.)

Blanding soon became suddenly fascinated by Hawaii and travelled there, staying for the year until his enlistment in the U.S. Army in December, 1917. Entering as an infantry private, he underwent officer training and was commissioned a 2^nd lieutenant before being discharged in December, 1918, soon after the Armistice.

He pursued further art studies in 1920, in Paris and London, traveled in Central America and the Yucatan, and resumed living in Honolulu in 1921. Finding work as an artist in an advertising agency, he happened into two years of writing poems published daily in the Honolulu Star Bulletin for an advertiser. These featured local people and events, and became well-known and popular -- whether because of or in spite of always mentioning the Aji-No-Moto brand of MSG.

The popularity of these ad-poems led Blanding to follow the advice of newspaper colleagues by publishing a collection of his poetry in 1923. When his privately published 2000 copies quickly sold out, he followed it with a commercially published edition the same year, and with additional verse and prose books. For his fifth book in 1928, he no longer used a local or West Coast publisher, but the New York publisher Dodd, Mead & Company. The result, Vagabond's House, was reviewed promptly by the New York Times, and was a great commercial success. By 1948 it went through nearly fifty printings in several editions that together sold over 150,000 copies.

In 1928 he suggested and founded the annual holiday Lei Day in Hawaii.

While he remained strongly attached to Hawaii, his connections to the world of celebrities drew him often to the mainland, and his income made hotel life and multiple residences feasible. During his high-school years in Lawton, Oklahoma, he is said to have saved the life of a 7- or 8-year-old neighbor, Lucille "Billie" Cassin, by picking her up and telephoning for a doctor, when she had jumped off her porch and deeply cut her foot on a broken milk bottle. Cassin eventually took the stage name of Joan Crawford, and their reacquaintance in 1936 on the set of "The Gorgeous Hussy", which starred her, suggests the level of his own celebrity.

Blanding married Dorothy Binney Putnam (described as a "socialite") on 13 June 1940, and they lived in Fort Pierce,Florida. They divorced in June of 1947, and he had no descendants.

Blanding was strongly affected by U.S. entry into World War II, including the knowledge of his island paradise as a military target, the reactions of those he met on his lecture tours, and the fall of Bataan. Bataan surrendered April 9, 1942, while he was on tour, and he wrote "Bataan Falls", 16 emotional lines in response. On the 25^th, he enlisted as a private, at the age of 47. He served eleven months in the 1208th Service Corps Unit, Infantry, and was discharged as a corporal.

He died of a heart attack, at home in Los Angeles on June 9, 1957, at the age of 62.

[edit] "Vagabond's House"

He published his long poem "Vagabond's House" several times. (It was in the first, private, printing of Leaves from a Grass-House in 1923; the commercially published edition of the same book, later that year, included it with the title changed to "Aloha House". In 1928 he restored the original "Vagabond's House" title, making it the title poem of another collection.) Its detailed fantasy begins

When I have a house -- as I sometime may --

I'll suit my fancy in every way.

then describes a home filled with the mostly exotic mementos its poet collected in years of wandering the world's seaports -- or at least might have collected if his travels hadn't interfered -- and closes by admitting

It's just a dream house anyway.

[edit] Bibliography

Leaves from a Grass-House
- 2000-copy private printing - 1923
- commercial publication - 1923
Paradise Loot - 1925
Flowers of the Rainbow - 1926
The Virgin of Waikiki - 1926
Vagabond's House - 1928
Hula Moons - 1930
Songs of the Seven Senses - 1931
Stowaways in Paradise - 1931
Let Us Dream - 1933
Memory Room - 1935
The Rest of the Road - 1937
Drifter's Gold - 1939
Floridays - 1941
Pilot Bails Out - 1943
Today is Here - 1946
Mostly California - 1948
A Grand Time Living - 1950
Joy is an Inside Job - 1953
Hawaii Says Aloha - 1955
No Strings on Tomorrow - Unpublished