Harold Poor was born in 1935 in Missouri, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1953 to 1957. As an undergraduate, Harold majored in German history and decided to follow an academic career by pursuing an M.A.(1958) and a Ph.D. (1965) in German and European history at Columbia University. While still a graduate student, Harold taught as an Instructor in History at both City College (1960) and Temple University (1961-1963). He then taught at Smith College from 1963 to 1966, where he became an Assistant Professor of German history. In 1966, he came to the Rutgers College History Department where he continued to teach and administer until his premature retirement in 1991 on disability because of AIDS. He died on January 24, 1992.

Harold Poor was one of the most gifted and charismatic teachers in the History Department. His courses ranged widely over German and European history, focusing upon cultural, political and intellectual aspects of 19th and 20th century history. He pioneered in the teaching of gay history with his course on „History and the Homosexual“ in the fall of 1984. In addition to his teaching, Harold published in 1968 his dissertation on Kurt Tucholsky and the Ordeal of Germany, 1914-1935. He also was the co-author of a music drama Tickles by Tucholsky, which was first produced at Brandeis University and then off Broadway at Theater Four in 1976. As an ardent bicyclist, he also published Bicycling in New Jersey: Thirty Tours in 1978. From 1981 through 1983, he served as the national Chairperson for the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association. For the History Department, Harold served as Undergraduate Chairperson from 1989 to 1991 and was the Director of the Rutgers Junior Year Abroad Program in Germany from 1985 to 1987.