Walt Whitman Walks Among Us

IN Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn on Nov. 15, a tall old man in outmoded dress could be seen ambling about with the aid of a long walking stick. He wore a black coat, a black vest hung with a thin gold chain and a white collared shirt open wide at the neck.

Much of his face was obscured by an enormous white beard, and his long gray hair splayed out in the wind beneath a green slouch hat. The hat had a dent, as was preferred by Walt Whitman, the poet for whom this man, a 79-year-old retired teacher named Darrel Blaine Ford, was filling in.

The world has been 116 years without Whitman, who died in 1892 and is best known for his poetry collection “Leaves of Grass.” But for about 25 years, Mr. Ford has donated himself as a stand-in for the poet, attending various events and visiting schools and even the Whitman family grave in Camden, N.J. The role is the fulfillment of a passion that began in Mr. Ford’s childhood and was made possible many years later by his realization that in Whitman, he had not only a kindred spirit but essentially a twin.

“Walt got the talent,” Mr. Ford is fond of saying, “and I got the looks.”
Whitman, who served as the editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was a promoter of Fort Greene Park — Washington Park in his time — though he did not live to see its Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, the memorial column whose centennial was celebrated last Saturday.

In a large floral tote bag, Mr. Ford carried four copies of “Leaves of Grass.” Asked if anything about Whitman disappointed him, Mr. Ford admitted, “Sometimes I find his self-advertising excessive.”

Still, Mr. Ford himself indulged in a bit of self-advertisement, handing out business cards. “If you ever need a Walt,” he said, “let me know.”
At one point, as Mr. Ford posed for photographs, a parade of schoolchildren passed by. After some discussion about whether he was real, or a statue, one child exclaimed: “He is a person! Oh, the heroic poet!”

Mr. Ford, a former biology teacher and ornithologist, grew up on the South Shore of Long Island. One warm spring morning, at the age of 9, as he remembers, he took a long bicycle ride and stopped to rest in the shade of a tree near an old cottage in the town of Huntington. He noticed a plaque identifying the house as Whitman’s birthplace. A woman — “a Mrs. Watson” — answered his knock, showed him the room where Whitman was born and provided him with a worn copy of “Leaves of Grass.”
“People ask if I am a published poet,” he said. Reaching into his tote, he produced an anthology that was a tribute to Whitman by Long Island poets. He opened to a page where, signed Darrel Blaine Ford, the following lines were set down:

Walt, you are my gestalt

you are my salt

you are my malt

your Leaves of Grass

are my universal pass.