The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  That was then. Now he scoots in reverse. The sun creeps up and the shadows shrink as he wipes sweat from his face and picks up his pace. If he could walk backward through time itself, he would. He should’ve seen the signs. He should’ve known the men were coming for him, because they came for everybody.

  They came on March 17, 1928, first to the dusty town of Pecos, 240 miles west. Fourteen strong-jawed lawmen and two federal prohibition officers seized 610 gallons of mash and whiskey and a 300-gallon still, then captured four ruffians on a ranch just over the New Mexico line and threw them in the Reeves County Jail, charged with supplying the whole damn West with strong drink.

  They came again on April 7, 1928. Squinty-eyed border patrol officers down south in desolate Del Rio confiscated 628 quarts of tequila and cognac in one of the largest liquor hauls anyone could remember.

  They came to the region time and again that year, doling out enough liquor charges to fill entire columns in the morning newspapers. They popped George Stringer of Abilene for transportation. Arrested Bud Moore of Abilene for possession. Collared Fred McCasland of Abilene for both.

  The pace of takedowns was the talk of Abilene, and folks wondered if the harassment was simply the last gasp of the teetotaling arbiters of amusement. They wondered, after nearly a decade of Prohibition, after seeing the illegal booze market boom almost unchecked, whether anyone of import would have the political will to keep up the charade. By 1928 the issue at last found its way into a presidential campaign. New York governor Al Smith, running for the Democrats, didn’t like the ban and had big ideas to change it. Herbert Hoover was considered a dry, though he left room for interpretation, calling Prohibition “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” which “must be worked out constructively.”

  The American people, for their part, abstained or kept good secrets, or read in the local newspaper about those who couldn’t do either. In Texas, substantially more than half of all cases brought to court in 1928 revolved around booze: the making, the selling, the carrying, or the drinking.

  So ubiquitous was intoxicating liquor and so close behind was the legal trouble in February 1928 that T. H. Millhorn was charged with possession, sale, and transportation. Millhorn was operator of the Southland Hotel, at 917 South First Street. And if a ten-year-old girl stood in front of Plennie Wingo’s café, she could throw a bottle of Waterfill and Frazier and hit the Southland Hotel.

  He should’ve seen them coming.

  The disappointment was fresh in his mind two years later, and when he closed his eyes he could still feel the click of the handcuffs around his wrists, the shame of his escort to the Taylor County lockup, the sting of the headline in the Abilene Morning Times.

  Liquor Cases Are Pending Against P.L. Wingo Here

  Restaurateur P.L. Wingo, 33, was bound over Tuesday afternoon to await the action of the grand jury on a liquor complaint in which he is charged with selling and possessing intoxicating liquor.

  Thus he became one of the 55,729 liquor cases brought to court in the United States that year. The grand jury was cold, and the bond $750, more than two years’ rent on the café. It was terrible. Terrible, but not impossible to overcome. A black eye, but not a knockout for a man obliged to do better and better. With enough sweat and traffic, he’d be back in the black in six months, a year tops. People had money to spend and Plennie was ready to trade them for fried chicken.

  In early March 1928, the market surged up and stayed there. The tight-lipped Federal Reserve Board met daily in Washington, fifteen hundred miles from Plennie Wingo’s limping café in Abilene, and no one knew exactly why. By the end of the month the tension was unbearable and people began to sell their stock. Favorites like Wright Aero and American Railway Express were dropped like they were hot. Things got worse as a wave of panic swept the market. Folks sold in astonishing volume and prices plummeted.

  But the market steadied, then rose, then rose some more, as though the quick drops had shaken out those who lacked the will to play it for eternity. Up it went, and smart observers noted that there had been a mighty revolution in industry, trade, and finance, and that the stock market was but an indicator of those tremendous changes in progress. People took to calling it a Big Bull Market. Herbert Hoover latched the Republican ticket to the wagon and rode it into the White House, crushing Al Smith in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. And in accepting the presidency, he reflected what many must have felt in their souls in those heady, lofty, optimistic days.

  “One of the oldest and perhaps noblest of human aspirations has been the abolition of poverty,” he said. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

  Plennie Wingo was listening.

  “The poorhouse,” Hoover said, “is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, poverty will be banished from this nation.”

  The audacity. The pomp. The language. It was all absolutely perfect for the moment. It was also very, very wrong. So wrong that Hoover—a Horatio Alger–esque multimillionaire who would later be summoned to service by more presidents than any other American chief executive, who was awarded more honorary degrees than any other American, whose relief efforts are said to have saved more human lives than those of any other individual in all of human history—would be defined by and remembered for how wrong he was.

  And what comes next sets the stage for our story.

  By the time Hoover was having the very first telephone installed in the Oval Office, the financial system had become so entangled and convoluted, the securities-absorbing investment trusts and branch offices of Wall Street trading firms so numerous, the ticker so overworked, that few had any real idea what was actually happening. But the massive majority did not care. They expected whatever was going on to keep on going on, and someday they would cash in that American Can stock and think themselves wise. The skies would be full of airplanes, the roads full of shiny new cars, and poverty would be a forgotten social ill of a bygone era.

  Then, in early September, the market broke. The drop was short-lived, and by midmonth averages were back up. Then it slipped harder, and by early October most watchers knew something was wrong, though they weren’t sure what. They remained optimistic, outwardly at least. The pointy-heads at the Harvard Economic Society said that “despite its severity, we believe that the slump in stock prices will prove an intermediate movement and not the precursor of a business depression.” Iron output was slower. Steel production was off. Fewer cars were selling and fewer were coming off the line. Home building was down. Freight-car loadings fell. Nonetheless, “the conditions which result in serious business depressions are not present,” said the head of the Cleveland Trust Company. “Unless we are to have a panic—which no one seriously believes—stocks have hit bottom,” said the director of McNeel’s Financial Service. “The industrial situation in the United States,” said the chairman of the National City Bank of New York, “is absolutely sound and our credit situation is in no way critical.”

  What came next was monumentally bewildering and frightening to anyone paying attention. What came next, on the morning of Thursday, October 24, 1929, was liquidation. Prices dropped. Dropped fast. Dropped hard. Dropped vertically. Dropped with an unprecedented and riveting violence. Dropped so mercilessly that outside the stock exchange, a roar rose into the morning air as a crowd gathered on Broad Street. As the New York City police arrived, a workman appeared atop a building to do some repairs. The hysterical crowd had made him for a suicide and was encouraging him to jump.

  The hysteria bled into the next week.

  Stocks were selling for nothing. Weren’t selling. Rumors spread like wildfire. A suicide wave started, and eleven well-known speculators killed themselves. Two men with a joint account jumped hand in hand out a window in the Ritz. An investment firm ran an ad in the Wall Street
Journal that read: “S-T-E-A-D-Y Everybody! Calm thinking is in order.” Police fished the body of a commission merchant out of the Hudson River—his pockets contained $9.40 and some margin calls. Desk clerks in New York hotels, it was said, were asking guests if they would be using the room for sleeping or jumping.

  The market fell and fell until the news at last, slowly but surely, reached the rest of the puzzled nation around the time the market finally stopped its monthlong slide in the middle of November.

  In Abilene, there were no runs on banks in those early days. They were paving a new stretch of Highway 30 and playing host to a conference of Methodists, and the Majestic was showing The Saturday Night Kid, a talkie starring Clara Bow, James Hall, and Jean Arthur. But Plennie Wingo read the bleak and foreboding reports.

  Midwestern livestock was selling slow in Kansas City, with the chief influence cited as a “sluggish, depressing beef trade.” Fort Worth livestock wasn’t even selling. Cotton was down. Grain was haunted by reports that Europe was overloaded with breadstuff supplies, and the Chicago wheat market suffered material setbacks in prices, which “bumped into a stone wall,” as a reporter put it.

  The seams had come apart.

  In the first three months of 1930, as scientists settled on naming a newly discovered planet after the Roman god of the underworld and judge of the dead, the stock market looked as though it were making a recovery. But in April it lost momentum, and it dropped hard again in June, and continued to drop, week after week and month after month.

  Before, the fundamentals were simple. A man needed to eat in order to work and he worked in order to eat. But the house of cards had collapsed for reasons Plennie could not fully understand, and on October 29, 1929—the worst day of all, the newspapers said—some 16 million shares of stock changed hands and the New York Times industrial average plunged almost forty points. What Plennie could understand was what he could see, that work was drying up in West Texas, and with it, the essential sustenance on which a profitable café is run: a man with money enough to afford a meal in a restaurant. Business was down. Way down.

  Plennie tried advertising for $2.50 in the Abilene Daily Reporter, and for less in the student newspapers at Abilene Christian College and McMurry College. But traffic slowed and bills came due and he held on as long as he could. He scaled back by laying off employees, the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. Their names flitted through his mind like flies through the holes in a screen door. Anderson Webb, helper; Marcellus Hughes, helper; Frank Lawson (wife Parthenia), dishwasher; Plummer McKinney, waiter; Margaret Neighbors, waitress; Calvin Smith (wife Lula), cook; Hugh Knight, waiter; Grover Howe (wife Marie), cook; Davis Nordyke (wife Pearla), cook; Rollie O. Cloud (wife Myrtle, and daughter Ruth), waiter.

  And finally, when the bank came to take the café for good: Plennie Lawrence Wingo, proprietor.

  But he is unlike them in one way: he has a plan. His toes are pointed west in the new light as he reverses down First Street and rounds the bend onto Chestnut. If at first it was difficult to manage a mile or two backward without tiring, he can now finish ten without difficulty. He feels now, after months of training, as though he has been walking backward his entire life. He turns around as he nears his house, the sun higher now, the birds awake, the ’poorwills and wrens and flycatchers. He walks normal now, facing forward, up the sidewalk toward a home he stands to lose if nothing is done to make money, a home where his loyal wife and loving daughter are sleeping, a home where the plan first struck him like a rattlesnake, seized him cold, and began to swell in his mind, his singular hope against hope: to gain fame and fortune by walking backward around the great world.

  2.

  Doing Something

  In early 1931 it wasn’t like you could step outside and see the Depression hanging in the air like fog on an April morning. But maybe you could hear it, if you were in the right place at the right time. You could hear your neighbor joking about the farmer who broke his back trying to lift twenty-five cents’ worth of wheat. You could hear the governor-elect of Texas saying that the “Depression clouds had all but blacked out the sun of optimism.” You could hear it standing in England, Arkansas, when five hundred farmers stormed the business district, demanding food and threatening to take it, until a hurried call was placed to the Red Cross. You could hear one of the farmers, crying and halfheartedly waving a pickaxe, saying, “We are not going to let our children starve.” You could hear it in Oklahoma City, as a mob of a thousand jobless men and women coalesced and marched on City Hall, looting stores on the way, until police dispersed the crowd with tear gas and fire hoses and arrested twenty-six people. The whole damn country was rioting: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amarillo, Austin. You could hear it riding in a train car from town to town, dodging the bulls, listening to the stories of honest men who yearned for work of any kind; some two million were now living as nomads, crisscrossing the country, looking for any employment.

  On certain days in certain places, you could hear the gunshots or see the bodies falling, as each bank failure led to more unemployment and less credit and less cash.

  They would later say it was a myth, an urban legend, that men offed themselves after the market crashed. And maybe they’d be right: the official mortality numbers show no immediate uptick in suicides. But the evidence of a macabre trend piled up in the papers. Alongside articles about plummeting wages for those blue-collar workers lucky enough to have kept their jobs, and the eight million unemployed Americans desperate for a paycheck, they told of Lee A. Gamble, thirty-five, of 950 Park Avenue, a graduate of Phillips Exeter who schooled in the Ivy League and fell or jumped from a window at the Yale Club, opposite Grand Central Station, at 4 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1930. He’d bought his seat on the stock exchange just a year before, and when he landed nine stories below, witnesses were horrified. They told how in March 1930, Dr. Benjamin F. Battin, fifty-five, a former Swarthmore College professor and vice-president of the National Surety Company, used a rope to hang himself in his hotel room on Eighth Avenue, leaving a note that expressed fear he would soon lose his job. Bellboys found his body when he didn’t answer calls. And on the same day in April 1931, John W. Marshall, vice-president of Safe Deposit & Trust Company, shot himself in Baltimore, and Frederick Holdsworth, a real estate agent, leaped from a bank building in Boston.

  Closer to home, A. A. Glover, the mayor of San Angelo, Texas, eighty miles southeast of Abilene, leaped to his death from the sixth floor of a bank building downtown. He was a husband and father of two, Methodist, a Royal Arch Mason, founding member of the Kiwanis Club, and a member of the Knights of Pythias, like Plennie. He was also general manager of Martin Glover Wholesale Company, and friends said he had been worried the past few weeks about “reverses in finances.” No one saw him jump, but they found his hat on the fire escape and his coat folded neatly on the windowsill.

  On and on it went. Men handled the worst of the hard times in different ways.

  On April 15, 1931, the sun skimming up on Fort Worth, Plennie Wingo pulled on his best pair of pinstripe pants, one leg at a time. He buttoned his white Oxford over his lean Texan frame, tied his best necktie snug, slipped into his shiny black Sunday shoes, and slid into a suit coat that matched his trousers. He finally pulled a white Stetson down on his ears, a good-guy hat for a guy trying.

  If a man aimed to walk backward around the world, best to leave no doubt in the minds of passersby that he was doing so with purpose.

  This mission was no lark.

  Though his means of traverse was unusual, let there be no doubt that Plennie Lawrence Wingo was a businessman on a business trip. The letters he carried on his person—official letters, mind you, from half a dozen Texas dignitaries—spoke to his resolve and the serious nature of what might have been interpreted as an act of folly. He hoped they’d help grease his path through the bureaucracy of municipalities that might frown on a man engaged in such peculiar behavior at such a serious and trying time. He had received letters of intr
oduction and character references from Mr. Carswell, president of the Abilene Chamber of Commerce; Mr. W. R. “Ruck” Sibley, chief of the Abilene Police Department; Dr. L. W. Hollis, who had received Plennie Wingo into the world thirty-six years before and testified truly that he had known the young man his entire life; and the Honorable Thomas E. Hayden Jr., mayor of Abilene, Texas.

  Notably missing from the bundle of good tidings was a letter from William Bryce, mayor of Fort Worth. That was something of a sore spot for Plennie, who had sought out the mayor’s endorsement the previous afternoon. He asked specifically if Mayor Bryce could address a letter to James John Walker, known to the world as Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant playboy mayor of New York City, currently on holiday in Palm Springs, California, while officially under investigation for allegations of misfeasance, incompetence, inefficiency, neglect of public duties, and bringing the city administration “into disrepute.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Mayor Bryce had told Plennie, seeming embarrassed.

  Plennie had thanked him and exited City Hall with yet another name on the list of people who had backed out or were otherwise unwilling to fully support his bold idea. That list included his original publicity man, who had a car, his backup publicity man, who had an even better car, and, sadly, Plennie’s wife, Idella, who had never really warmed to the idea of her husband leaving on a trip around the world while she scratched to survive the greatest economic depression the world had ever known, alone.

  The defections solidified his determination. The naysayers were all now fuel for the fire that raged inside his belly.

  He had let fly his frustration the day before during a meeting with officials at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, whom he tried to convince to fund his trip in exchange for advertising Fort Worth to the whole wide world. He was certain clerks and secretaries could overhear his complaints, but he couldn’t keep his disappointment inside any longer.