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,” Sam Porpora said. “It was a promotional idea. We made it up, never dreaming it would go worldwide.”
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.
Porpora’s story begins in the late 1960s. He’d 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 favorite of drunken derelicts.
The site needed money and publicity, Porpora recalled. That 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 each for Poe, his wife and his mother-in-law – and a bottle of cognac.
The romantic image of the mysterious man in black caught the fancy of Poe fans, and a tradition grew. For Jeffrey A. Savoye, secretary-treasurer of the E.A. Poe Society of Baltimore, the tradition acquired a life of its own.
“Even if Sam’s story is true, so what? It’s a tradition,” Savoye said. “It’s a nice tradition, whether it dates back to 1949 or the ’70s.”
