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Poe's Scottish Connections
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Searching For Poe In Scotland
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With letters of introduction from Caledonian Club of San Francisco's Past Chiefs, Jimmy Hamilton and Jack Scott, Burns Federation Past president and currant C.E.O., John Ingles, welcomes Bob and Grace into their offices at The Dick Institute.
His gift of the Burns Chronicle (featured on the Kilmarnock page) was reciprocated with a copy of Raymond Foye's book, The Unknown Poe. Retired Chief Constable of Glasgow Police, John Ingles, arranged a meeting with the Steward of Irvine Burns Club, David Smith.
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The cover of just one of the many Local History books published by Frank Beattie in which he details facts he knew of Poe's childhood in Kilmarnock. He is a Staff Reporter for the local newspaper, Kilmarnock Standard. Brill and Beattie are seen, below, discussing the research project.
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After our first trip to Ayrshire in search of Poe's connections, while performing my daily jog, a one-legged raven happened upon the levee that separates the Pacifica Golf Course from the beach on the other side. I resolved to take some food with me the next day, and and if it reappeared, I would feed it. Seven years later I had three seperate flocks (communitees) of ravens numbering about seventy birds in all. Here I am seen on a typical period of rest during which I fed the birds, small cubes of animal fat that I "nuked' for about a minute. The birds can only swallow. After a few years they knew me, and ate out of my hand every day after they began. I did this in remembrance of Edgar Allan Poe, and to obtain some mental health relief from the press of the millions of incomming immigrants from around the world. In 2002 I sold out and moved to The Big Island of Hawaii to finish our book.
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In Chapter 4 his book, Proud Kilmarnock, local historian, Frank Beattie, seen above, discusses our first meeting with him during our 1997 visit. One observation he made, as a "local," was of my immediately noticing the rooks everywhere in Kilmarnock, as do not exist in Perthshire. Since then, Mr. Beattie has been crucial to our ongoing research in the Ayrshire area. He had edited much of our manuscript, and corrected our erros about interpretation of facts of the local area. He is responsble for lobbying the Kilmarnock Historical Society on our behalf for the commemorative plaque that documents Poe's aunt and uncle Fowlds' house in Kilmarnock, among his other singular finds.~~~
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