August 17, 2007	Friday	Sha’aban 3, 1428

BALTIMORE: The legend was almost too good to be true. For decades, a mysterious figure dressed in black, his features cloaked by a wide-brimmed hat and scarf, crept into a churchyard to lay three roses and a bottle of cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.

Now, a 92-year-old man who led the fight to preserve the historic site says the visitor was his creation.

“We did it, myself and my tour guides,” said Sam Porpora. “It was a promotional idea. We made it up, never dreaming it would go worldwide.”

Porpora is an energetic, dapper fellow in a newsboy cap and a checked suit with a bolo tie. He has a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous smile, and he tells his tale in the rhythms of a natural-born storyteller.

No one has ever claimed ownership of the legend. So why is Porpora coming forward now?

“I really can’t tell you,” Porpora answered. “I love Poe. I love talking about Poe. I had a lot to do with making Poe a universal figure. I’m doing it because of my love for the story.”

Porpora’s belief that he resurrected the international fame of Poe, that master of mystery and melancholia, is questioned by some Poe scholars. But they do credit Porpora, a former advertising executive, with rescuing the cemetery at Westminster Presbyterian Church where the writer is buried.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore, who has nurtured for years the legend of the so-called Poe Toaster. Confronted with Porpora’s assertion that the whole thing is a hoax, Jerome reacted like a man who has been hit by his beloved grandfather. He is sad. He feels betrayed. But he is reluctant to punch back.

“He’s like a mentor to me,” Jerome said of Porpora. “And I can tell you that if it weren’t for him, Westminster Hall may not be there. But to say the toaster is a promotional hoax, well, all I can say is that’s just not so.”

Could it be, to quote Poe, that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”? Porpora’s story begins in the late 1960s. He had just been made historian of the Westminster Presbyterian Church, built in 1852. There were fewer than 60 congregants and Porpora, in his 60s, was one of the youngest. The overgrown cemetery was a favourite 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. The romantic image of the mysterious man in black caught the fancy of Poe fans and a tradition grew.

In about 1977, Jerome began inviting a handful of people each year to a vigil for the mysterious stranger. The media began chronicling the arrivals and departures of a “Poe-like figure”. In 1990, Life magazine published a picture of the shrouded individual. In 1993, he left a note saying “the torch would be passed.” Another note in 1998 announced that the originator of the tradition had died. Later vigil-keepers reported that at least two toasters appeared to have taken up the torch in different years.

For Jeffrey A. Savoye, secretary-treasurer of the E.A. Poe Society of Baltimore, the tradition acquired a life of its own.

Porpora’s account is not 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.

Porpora acknowledges that someone has since “become” the Poe toaster. “For us, it was a one-time thing. If I could have brought Edgar Allen Poe back to life, I would have — that would have been the biggest promotion of all,” he said.—AP