Cognac? A Toast
Poe Toaster Revealed?. The mystery man who left three roses and a bottle of good cognac every year at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, Md., turns out to have
been a 92-year-man and friends who led the fight to preserve the historic site, according to the Washington Post.
"It was a promotional idea," Sam Popora, a former advertising executive, claims. "We made it up, never dreaming it would go worldwide."
Promo or not, the gesture has served a magnificent purpose. At the least it rescued the cemetery at Westminster Presbyterian Church where Poe is buried.
In the late 1960s Popora was made historian of the Westminster Presbyterian Church, built in 1852. There were fewer than 60 congregants and Porpora, then in his 60s, was one of the youngest. The overgrown cemetery was a favorite of drunken derelicts. The site needed money and publicity, Porpora recalled. That, he said, is when the idea of the Poe toaster came to him. The story, as Porpora told it to a local reporter then, was that the tribute had been laid at the grave on Poe's Jan. 19 birthday every year since 1949. Three roses _ one for Poe, one for his wife, and one for his mother-in-law _ and a bottle of cognac, because Poe loved the stuff even though he couldn't afford to drink it unless someone else was buying.
Since at least the early 1970s, every year on January 19, Poe's birthday, the man would appear at the Westminster Burying Grounds, dressed in black, wearing a hat and scarf to hide his identity.
In about 1977, a handful of people was invited each year to a vigil for the mysterious stranger. The media began chronicling the arrivals and departures of a "Poe-like figure."
But even with the "confession," there is still mystery.
Members of Baltimore's E.A. Poe Society insist they recall members of the old congregation _ all now dead _ talking about the Poe toaster before Porpora says he made it up. Stories since the 1970s refer to older newspaper accounts about the visitor. Jerome found a 1950 newspaper clipping from The (Baltimore) Evening Sun that mentions "an anonymous citizen who creeps in annually to place an empty bottle (of excellent label)" against the gravestone.
Nor is Porpora's account consistent. He said he invented the stranger in an interview with a reporter in 1967, but the story to which he refers appeared in 1976. Shortly afterward, the vigils and the yearly chronicles of the stranger's visits began. During the same interview, Porpora said both that he made the story up and that one of his tour guides went through a pantomime of dressing up, sneaking into the cemetery and laying the tribute on the grave.
Porpora acknowledges that someone has since [base "]become[per thou] the Poe toaster.
Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore, says the vigils will continue each January 19.
[DarkEcho / Paula Guran]
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