The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  “I know times are bad and most everybody is grabbing at straws to survive, and so am I,” he ranted to the Chamber, after his second publicity man reneged. “But I think my two defecting managers are just plain sissies and afraid to take a chance.”

  He didn’t have much money to begin with, but he told the businessmen he was going to wire all he had to his wife and start his trip without a penny in his pocket, just to prove he could.

  “And I promise I will not beg, borrow, or steal,” he said. Barring sickness or accidents or objections, or maybe laws that would prohibit him from walking backward across certain states or countries, he was going to do it, or die trying.

  “I firmly believe I can complete the tour around the world on my own and alone,” he said.

  One of the men piped up.

  “Mr. Wingo, I admire your spunk,” he said. “I believe you will go far.”

  With that, Mr. Charles G. Cotten, manager of the Trade Extension Department for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, penned a letter and handed it to Plennie.

  To whom it may concern:

  This will introduce Mr. Plennie L. Wingo of Abilene, Texas. Mr. Wingo begins a backward walking tour of the world from Fort Worth on Wednesday, April 15th. Upon his arrival at the various cities scheduled on his itinerary, he will report to the office of Western Union and it will be appreciated if you will be kind enough to indicate the time of arrival in your city and the time of departure with our thanks.

  Mr. Wingo comes to us very highly recommended from Abilene, Texas, a nearby prosperous West Texas city. Just recently, Mr. Wingo conducted quite a great deal of backward walking stunts, lending publicity to the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show March 5th to 15th.

  We certainly wish Mr. Wingo the very best of luck on his tour of the world walking as he will the entire distance facing the world backwards.

  Any courtesy shown him will be appreciated and possibly serve to speed him on his way happily anticipating what he might face next, even though he would be getting a rear vision of the world.

  Very truly yours,

  Charles G. Cotten

  It was tucked into the black notebook Plennie had bought from the variety store, along with a cheap ballpoint pen. He also carried a new Holy Bible, a gift from a street preacher named Paul Clifton from the Open Bible Mission whom he’d met the day before. Clifton had recognized Plennie from the newspapers and approached him on the street.

  “My prayer will be with you all the way,” he had said, and it had made Plennie wonder about things.

  Now Plennie dragged his suitcase into the Greyhound bus station.

  Now he showed Mr. Cotten’s letter to the man behind the counter.

  Now the man looked Plennie over, then studied the letter, then agreed to carry Plennie’s luggage free of charge all the way to New York City, in the spirit of goodwill.

  Plennie walked from the Greyhound station to the Western Union and showed his letter to the clerk, A. C. Farmer, who, upon reading the letter, stamped it in the bottom left-hand corner:

  9:03 a.m., April 15th, 1931

  “Which way are you going around the world?” Farmer asked.

  “Going east,” Plennie said. “You keep watching west and I’ll be back.”

  His friends had clustered outside. So had some strangers wondering what the commotion was about. Plennie greeted them all, shook their hands, and thanked them. He turned to face the west, waved, took his first step backward, then tore out like a page from the Bible.

  And so it began, a man walking east toward Dallas, down Main Street to Highway 1, on his way somewhere, doing something. He was backing smooth and easy now, like he had been born to go backward. He watched automobiles appear like ants at the end of a long, unspooled ribbon of highway, the land as flat as a tabletop, and they grew larger as they drew closer, closer, closer…then zoomed by in a gust of dust. The dirt devils danced at his feet as he hugged the shoulder, as close to the edge of the road as possible, for 6,230 people had already been killed by automobiles in the first three months of 1931, an astonishing number of newfangled deaths. He nodded or waved or smiled as drivers and wives and backseated children bent their necks and puzzled over the odd man on the highway. And then they were gone as quickly as they came. He was tickled by the looks on their faces. It was him they were trying to see.

  One hundred twenty-five million Americans on the planet, and only one walking around it backward.

  * * *

  Once he reached the country outside town, slipping out of the Grand Prairie, through the Eastern Cross Timbers, and into the Northern Blackland Prairie, Plennie had a chance to reflect on the chaotic whirlwind of events that had brought him to this shoulder of barren Texas highway. He would tell his own origin story hundreds of times in hundreds of places, to anyone who cared to listen, until it became something like a hymn. He would skip the part about going to jail.

  He was born on his mother’s twentieth birthday, January 24, 1895, the second son of John Newton Wingo and Willie Drucilla Warren Wingo, and his parents never would tell him or anybody else why they named their squirmy baby boy Plennie. John Newton’s people came from Alabama to help settle East Texas in the mid-1800s, and that’s where he was born, in Red River County. John fell ill in his early twenties and was killed by pneumonia five and a half months after Plennie was born. Willie, originally from Union City, Tennessee, buried her young husband under a handsome column in the municipal cemetery in Abilene and, soon after, married his younger brother, Thomas. She would bear him ten more children, one every two or three years for the next twenty years: Elias, Pearce, Lula Mae, Aubrey, Vera, Thomas, Bruce, Achel, Dee, and Lena.

  Plennie was enterprising from the outset. When he was a boy he learned to catch rattlesnakes, plentiful in West Texas. He’d use a long stick with a forked end to pin the rattler’s head down, then carefully grab the tail beneath the rattles and use the stick to guide the snake into an open burlap sack. They went for a few cents each, depending on the size, for meat or fashion, and the ones he caught weighed anywhere between two and six pounds. He sold them for spending money, and he was never afraid.

  Plennie Wingo (back row, fifth from right) is pictured with his schoolmates in Tye, Texas, west of Abilene. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  He started waiting tables as a teenager, working for a man named Jim Thurmond in a café in Abilene when he wasn’t in school. He was a decent student, but he always had a restless and entrepreneurial spirit. “Mama,” he would tell his mother, “I want to go around this whole world.”

  Plennie Wingo (back row, center) with his family, sometime between 1911 and 1914. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Plennie met and married Idella Richards, a hard-faced woman from Hays County, Texas, down around Austin, and she delivered their first and only child, Vivian, in 1915, when Plennie was twenty years old. In the early 1920s, a chunk of the Wingos—including Plennie, Idella, and Vivian—left the Caprock region in a wagon brigade and made their way back east to Clay County, near Wichita Falls and the Oklahoma line. Within a few months, Plennie and Idella opened a restaurant in nearby Dundee, which had been carved out of the T Fork Ranch and swelled in population after the Wichita Valley Railway Corporation ran a line through town and built a three-story hotel there as a stopping-point station. Besides the restaurant and hotel, the new town featured two livestock dealers, a clothier, a general store, a hardware store, and an organ shop. After a few years, the Wingos moved to the boomtown of Abilene, which saw its population grow 600 percent from 3,400 in 1900 to more than 23,000 in 1930.

  Plennie Wingo with wife Della and daughter, Vivian, taken around 1919. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Plennie’s daughter, Vivian, was celebrating her fifteenth birthday with a party at their house when Plennie first bumped into his big idea. This was two and a half months after the stock market crashed, and Plennie had already begun to worry about his financial security. They’d had cake and opened gifts and Vivian an
d her friends were talking in the parlor, mostly about nonsense, like kids do. Plennie was reading the paper and minding his own business as they went on and on about how every physical feat had been accomplished…and wasn’t it true?

  If the boom years of the 1920s had illustrated anything, it was that the country could be shaken coast to coast by a trifle, and there seemed to be something new every day. There were fewer newspapers than ever before, and those had larger circulations than ever before, and now some 55 newspaper chains controlled some 230 daily papers with a combined circulation of more than 13 million. Overall newspaper readership had soared from 28 million to 36 million in a little more than a decade, 1920 to 1930. The papers were also relying more on syndicated wire services like the Associated Press and Newspaper Enterprise Association, so articles that might once have stayed local were now being read in papers across the country. On top of that, the sudden ubiquity of broadcast radio made it possible for more people to hear the same show at the same time. So the latest news felt made for the masses, and the United States had become a nation of fad-loving gossips, prone to being swept up on waves of excitement generated by whatever was new or odd or dramatic.

  Little attention was given to issues of import that might have dominated the day, like political scandals or Prohibition or the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lighting their crosses on the public squares. In the year 1919, after the Great War—which lasted 1,563 days, destroyed empires, killed some 10 million soldiers, and cost more than $300 billion—more than 4 million Americans participated in roughly three thousand strikes over labor, communism, socialism, and anarchy. But a mere two years later the Era of Wonderful Nonsense was in full swing, and with a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, Americans had withdrawn into an orgy of self-indulgence.

  Bring on the fickle.

  This was the era in which a young man named Richard Simon, who was launching a publishing house with his friend Schuster, took a clue from a relative who was addicted to the crossword puzzles that had for years appeared in the Sunday New York World. Within a month of publication, Simon & Schuster’s crossword puzzle book had become a best seller. It went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and started a puzzle craze that swept the nation. Women whose husbands devoured the puzzles referred to themselves as “crossword widows,” and practically everyone knew the two-letter name of the Egyptian sun god.

  The public’s appetite for all things trivial could not be quenched. Americans wanted to read about the marriage of Hollywood starlet Gloria Swanson to the French aristocrat Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudray. They wanted the details of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the daily unfolding drama of Floyd Collins, a Kentucky explorer who got trapped in a cave and could only be reached by a small reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. They wanted Jack Dempsey and Red Grange and Babe Ruth and Paavo “Flying Finn” Nurmi. They wanted a cartoon panel of fascinating facts called Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which was at the peak of its popularity, syndicated internationally and read by some 80 million people.

  They wanted to see men and women dancing marathons and swimming the English Channel and walking upon the wings of airplanes. They wanted to be the first, the strongest, the best, the fastest—or to at least read about those who were.

  They read daily about William Williams, a Texan who embarked in 1929 on an odd physical challenge in Colorado that exemplifies the era. Zebulon Pike had first spotted Pikes Peak in 1806 while exploring land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase and concluded, after a failed attempt to summit, that “no human being could have ascended to its pinnacle.” But fourteen years later, an explorer named Edwin James reached the top of the 14,115-foot mountain. Then in 1858, Julia Archibald Holmes became the first white woman to ascend to the pinnacle. In 1901, two men from Denver drove a steam-powered car to the top. Then came Williams at the end of the Incredible Era, a man of his time, pushing a peanut up the mountain with his nose. He blew through several pairs of shoes and gloves and more than a hundred peanuts, and he wore an advertisement for a Georgia peanut company. He finished in twenty-two days and offered the press a quote as odd as his stunt: “It doesn’t require pull for one to get ahead in life—it just takes push.”

  The American people wanted entertainment. They wanted hullabaloo and ballyhoo.

  And, oh, how they wanted Charles Lindbergh.

  The handsome young pilot wasn’t the first to cross the Atlantic by air, but he captured the country’s attention like no one else had or, arguably, ever would again. After a New York hotel owner offered up a prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop flight from there to Paris, most everyone gave favorable odds to one of two well-known planes and crews: Clarence Chamberlin and Lloyd Bertaud flying the Columbia, or North Pole explorer Richard Byrd and crew flying the America. But Lindbergh, flying the Spirit of St. Louis, hopped off first and alone on the morning of May 20, 1927, and the entire country fixed its hopes and common exaltation on the pilot.

  Soon after being mobbed by Frenchmen upon arrival at Le Bourget aviation field, “Lucky Lindy” was bigger than life. It helped that he was modest and charmingly thankful and eschewed the offers to appear in movies or to charge for his autograph. ACCLAIMED BY WORLD AS GREATEST HERO IN HISTORY OF AVIATION, read the headlines in several Texas newspapers, which devoted hundreds of column inches to the airman.

  A navy ship dispatched by President Coolidge fetched the ace and his plane and delivered him to a country in need of a man to save it from its media diet of novelty and guilty pleasures. The street cleaners in New York swept up 1,800 tons of scraps of paper that had been thrown out of windows onto Lindbergh’s parade through the streets. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor. He heard Coolidge deliver a presidential speech as long as his State of the Union address to Congress. Towns, schools, and streets wanted to share the distinction of his name. His reception, historians would note, took on the aspects of a vast religious revival.

  Plennie Wingo had witnessed such a scene himself when Lindbergh came to West Texas in September of 1927, just four months after his epic flight.

  Oh, the excitement. The Hilton Hotel hosted the Lindbergh Hop featuring the Bob Dean orchestra. Downtown businesses competed for prize money by decorating Lindbergh-themed window displays, with model airplanes suspended over construction-paper Atlantic Oceans and replica Eiffel Towers and Statues of Liberty. The event was so big that the Abilene Morning Reporter-News published its largest ever paper at 102 pages, heralding “Lindbergh Day” with a special section devoted to the colonel, and bragged that the paper used to print it, unspooled, would stretch all the way to San Antonio, 250 miles away. It was a chance for ambitious Abilene to put itself on the map, and the effort included verbatim testimonials from dozens of citizens about why their parched West Texas town was the greatest in America, and a feature story boasting of the city’s modern infrastructure, like gas, electric, paving, and a sewer system.

  The Lindbergh welcome committee alone included seventy-one regional mayors, ninety-five newspaper editors, twenty-eight chamber of commerce officials, and seventy-three of the most beautiful young ladies in West Texas, called “The Spirits.” Reporters estimated that all 30,000 Abilene residents, plus 40,000 out-of-towners, turned out to watch the dapper barnstormer ride in a seventy-four-car parade from the airfield to downtown Abilene. Seated next to Lindbergh in an open-topped sedan was the First Lady of Texas, an Abilene girl whose father ran Citizens Bank in town. The National Guard and the Boy Scouts saluted as the cavalcade traveled west to Oak, north to South Fourth, then on to Chestnut, gliding in all its glory right past the front door of Plennie Wingo’s café.

  And seeing all that, bearing witness to the outpouring of pomp and solemn communal exaltation, changes a man, makes him want to be something more than he already is. How could it not?

  So maybe that set the stage for Plennie’s idea, when Lindbergh came to Abilene.

  But then a fe
w months later, in January of 1928, a man named Henry “Dare Devil” Roland scaled the walls of the nine-story Mims Building and scattered the Abilene Morning Times from his perch as an advertising stunt. And then another “human fly” by the name of Al Willoughby climbed to the top of the Grace Hotel wearing a cape advertising a local business and dropped two boxes of free pencils embossed with the business’s name to the crowd watching below. Not to be outdone, a third, Babe White, climbed the Hilton and hung from a ledge, clinging to a stylish silk dress that was for sale at nearby Minter’s.

  The madness would not stop. In 1929, a man named Harm Bates Williams rolled a steel hoop 2,400 miles, from City Hall in Texas City to New York City. Two apparently sane men, a tailor and a barber from Rule, Texas, announced plans to play a running game of croquet all the way to Manhattan but were broke by Dallas. “We can’t eat croquet balls, you know?” one of them told reporters. And a San Benito cowboy named Ralph Sanders began training a bull named Jerry, with plans to ride the beast from the Rio Grande all the way to New York.

  “Has a wave of mild insanity swept over the American people,” asked the Shamrock Texan, “or are all these things merely the result of an inordinate craving for publicity?”

  Then, in the summer of 1929, just days after President Hoover signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact to forever outlaw war, and days before Babe Ruth hit his 500th home run, a stunt man named Benny Fox began training to sit for 100 hours on a flagpole atop Abilene’s high-rise Hilton Hotel. Ten thousand people were expected to watch, like little ants below, and the stimulation surrounding the sedentary stunt was superlative.