David Franks, "Friends of Footlong", davidfranks.ning.com
Artist and poet David Franks was found dead January 14 (2010). The famed “Poe Toaster” failed to show up on January 19 (2010). Coincidence, or the final flourish of a dedicated prankster?
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The duality of Franks’ nature was such that even though he was capable of making you feel like the only person in a crowded room, his penchant for the “grand manner”, as he often put it, endured.
It would be just the sort of duality needed to keep secret a very public tradition: the identity of the Edgar Allen Poe toaster, who failed to show up at the writer’s grave this week for this first time since 1949. There is a theory afoot that Franks was the famed anonymous visitor to Poe’s grave.
Rafael Alvarez, president of the Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore, appeared on WBAL AM the morning of Jan. 19 to discuss the possibility.
“It fit David’s love of the prank and the practical joke,” Alvarez said. “Particularly stunts that involved literary high wire acts.”
Continue reading “Was David Franks the Poe Toaster?” at Baltimore Brew.
A flashlight shines on items left on the gravestone of Edgar Allen Poe by people who pretended to be the mysterious "Poe Toaster" in Baltimore, early Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
BALTIMORE (AP) — Edgar Allan Poe fans waited long past a midnight dreary, but it appears annual visits to the writer’s grave in Baltimore by a mysterious figure called the “Poe Toaster” shall occur nevermore.
Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff Jerome said early Thursday that die-hard fans waited hours past when the tribute bearer normally arrives. But the “Poe Toaster” was a no-show for a third year in a row, leaving another unanswered question in a mystery worthy of the writer’s legacy. Poe fans had said they would hold one last vigil this year before calling an end to the tradition.
“It’s over with,” Jerome said wearily. “It will probably hit me later, but I’m too tired now to feel anything else.”
It is thought that the tributes of an anonymous man wearing black clothes with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s original grave on the writer’s birthday, date to at least the 1940s. Late Wednesday, a crowd gathered outside the gates of the burial ground surrounding Westminster Hall to watch for the mysterious visitor, yet only three impersonators appeared, Jerome said.
The gothic master’s tales of the macabre still connect with readers more than 200 years after his birth, including his most famous poem, “The Raven,” and short stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is considered the first modern detective story.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” as performed by Vincent Price
Jerome, who was first exposed to Poe through Vincent Price’s movies, believes people still identify with Poe’s suffering and his lifelong dream to be a poet. He has kept a vigil for the “Poe Toaster” each year since 1978 and built up a team of other dedicated Poe fans who stay awake all night to scan the shadows of the burial ground for the visitor.
“I’ve been part of a ritual that people around the world read about,” he said. “I’ll miss it.”
One Poe tradition may have ended, but Jerome said a reading of tributes by Poe fans at the gravesite planned for Thursday night may develop into a new ritual to mark the writer’s birthday.
Jerome says that wherever he travels, he’s asked whether the “Poe Toaster” is real. He believes the mystery of the “Poe Toaster” tradition will remain in the public consciousness despite the end of the visits.
Continue reading “Poe fans call an end to ‘Toaster’ tradition” at Associated Press.
Unflappable Esther Martin Has Run the Club Charles Since 1951. Who Better to Tell of Her Block’s Boom, Bust, and Possible Rebirth?
By Brennen Jensen (Baltimore City Paper, 2/16/2000)
“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
— Samuel Johnson
It’s the sprawling, penciled scrawl of a young sailor. A lonely sailor. A serviceman on the eve of shipping out to an uncertain fate in the Pacific waters of World War II.
“To a swell girl,” he writes, “I’ll remember you always and hope we meet again soon–real soon. Your tops, Hun, I only wish I could spend more time with you. Please think about ‘Pinky.’ ”
Esther Martin squints down at the message and the accompanying black-and-white photo, now turning sepia with age. It shows a radiant young girl with a Colgate smile and brunette tresses tumbling over her shoulders. This much she recognizes–it’s herself, 55-odd years ago when she was barmaid at the Band Box, a nightclub that once enlivened the 1300 block of North Charles Street. Across the bar from young Esther perches a grinning, fresh-faced seaman in dark sailor suit and neckerchief.
Esther W. Martin, longtime owner of a well-known Charles Street bar that evolved from Tenderloin to trendy, died Sunday at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center of complications after surgery. She was 80.
She retired about five years ago from active management of Club Charles, which she had owned since 1951 – and operated for several early decades as the Wigwam Bar, with a sign outside depicting a teepee and offerings of “Grub and Firewater.”
She was born Esther West to Native American parents in Asher, Okla. Family members said she attended schools there before moving in the 1930s to New York City where her sister, Mary Lou West, was a Stork Club hatcheck girl. She worked at the fabled Manhattan nightspot briefly before moving to Baltimore in 1940 with the goal of studying nursing at Johns Hopkins Hospital. To support herself, she tended bar at the old Airport Grill near Harbor Field – then the city’s airfield, and now Dundalk Marine Terminal. But she soon relinquished the idea of becoming a nurse, instead holding a succession of jobs along a midtown stretch of Charles Street that was home to bars and restaurants often filled with World War II servicemen and their dates. She worked at the original Club Charles, at Charles and Preston streets, and at the nearby Band Box tavern.
In 1951 she bought her own place, a restaurant and bar called Charles Seafood, in the 1700 block of N. Charles St., which she soon renamed the Wigwam. It was, at times, a rowdy place. By the 1970s, city police reported 82 calls in an eight-month period to the Wigwam, and the city liquor board threatened to close it.
About that time, Mrs. Martin bowed to neighborhood pressure for improvement of her establishment. She brought in her children to oversee the business. They took down the Wigwam sign, renamed the spot Club Charles, brought in decorator Vince Peranio and aimed for a younger, more affluent clientele.
“What a great Baltimore character she was, a tough lady with a heart of gold,” said filmmaker John Waters, a frequent visitor before and after the change. “When she owned the Wigwam it was the scariest bar in Baltimore,” said Mr. Waters. “It was the reverse of Studio 54 – you had to be scary or you wouldn’t be let in. It was so amazing how the scariest bar became the coolest bar. It’s been the anchor for the creative community in Baltimore. I loved talking to her. … She had one of the wildest, foulest mouths. She was the kind of Baltimore character that is getting rarer and rarer. She was an inspiration to me.”
