The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  They rebooted their plan over another cup of coffee, both men brainstorming stunts that would grab attention. The Hersch Tower in Elizabeth, also completed that year, was only twelve stories high, Schwartz said, his excitement growing. “I know Mr. Rosen, the manager there, and I know we can get a permit to walk that one. Not only that, I know all the merchants in Elizabeth. Selling advertising will be a breeze.”

  “Don’t talk to me about a breeze,” Plennie said.

  He gave Schwartz his telephone number at the St. Regis, and the next morning Schwartz sent a car for him. Plennie brought along his cane, his rearview glasses, and his scrapbook, heavy now with newspaper clippings. When he arrived in Elizabeth, he inspected the roof of the Hersch Tower. The ledge was eighteen inches wide, and each side of the art deco gem had architectural rises that would prove difficult to back over. The stunt would be tricky, but Plennie thought he could do it.

  Schwartz surprised Plennie with a stack of new business cards.

  FROM FORT WORTH, TEXAS

  AROUND THE WORLD BACK WARDS

  PLENNIE L. WINGO

  With the help of Alexander J. Schwartz, Plennie distributed business cards in New York and New Jersey, trying to raise money and add credibility to his stunt. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  They spent the next few hours looking for sponsors. The merchants of Elizabeth all seemed to know Schwartz, but Plennie got the sense that they weren’t fond of him. Many promised to pay only upon the completion of the stunt. A good businessman made smart decisions and knew full well what the newspapers were saying about the rise of corruption in the past year. You couldn’t even trust the law, anymore. Hoover’s Wickersham Commission had just denounced lawlessness in law enforcement, singling out New York City.

  On Saturday morning, the day of the advertised walk, Plennie visited Elizabeth mayor John Kenah, who honored the Texan with his autograph. Then he filled the next two hours parading heels-first through the streets of town wearing advertisements for the various shops that had signed on. He was something to behold, and the people of Elizabeth stopped and stared.

  A few minutes before noon, he arrived at the Hersch Tower and walked backward up the stairs as the crowd swelled. He figured the police ropes were keeping people back in case he fell.

  He should’ve been nervous but found his legs steady as he stepped up on the ledge and waved at the throngs below, the hotel men standing nearby on the roof. He began backing around the building, slowly at first, and heard the people on the ground gasp each time he stepped up and over an architectural feature, carefully navigating with his cane and mirrored glasses. The people cheered when he had cleared each obstacle. He traipsed the entire rectangle without so much as a wobble, and when he arrived where he’d started, he dramatically jumped to the roof and waved again. The crowd went crazy.

  He was miffed to see that Schwartz wasn’t standing on the roof with the hotel manager, but Plennie was so satisfied to have completed the stunt safely that he didn’t give it much thought. He looked over the ledge again and realized he had just risked life and limb for a few dollars. He’d later have nightmares about the walk and swear never to do it again, but then and there he was pretty proud.

  Schwartz didn’t show up for dinner. Nor was he back at the hotel. Plennie visited one of the merchants who’d sponsored him, and the man said that Schwartz had come around after the stunt and collected his fee. The other businessmen told the same story.

  Plennie was growing suspicious. He went to Schwartz’s house and found his mother and father, who seemed like good and honest people. Schwartz’s mother said he’d been home earlier but rushed out when he got an urgent call to go to New York City. Schwartz had told her he had to hustle across the bay to meet a man named Plennie Wingo.

  Plennie’s heart fell like a popped balloon. He’d been bamboozled. Hoodwinked. He felt stupid for being naive and enraged over the wasted time. The merchants had collectively pledged $86, enough to get him through a month without terrible want, and Plennie and Schwartz had agreed to split it down the middle. Now Plennie was back where he started.

  He never thought he’d see Schwartz again, and he didn’t have the time or money to stick around town and search for the bastard. Bitter lesson learned, he thought.

  He did want to get a letter of endorsement from Mr. Rosen, manager at the Hersch Tower, in the event he had to make other ledge-walking deals on his own. So he stayed in town Sunday and paid Rosen a visit on Monday morning. Rosen’s receptionist asked him to have a seat because Rosen was in a meeting. As Plennie waited, the door swung open and there stood Schwartz. He ran past a stunned Plennie, pushed into Rosen’s office without knocking, and slammed the door behind him.

  “What on the face of the earth is wrong with that guy?” the receptionist said.

  Plennie waited and thought through the confrontation. He was ready to give Schwartz a piece of his mind and demand his money. Five minutes slid by. Then ten. Then twenty. It was becoming clear that Schwartz wasn’t coming out so long as he was there. After waiting forty-five minutes, Plennie got up to go.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said loudly and slowly to the receptionist. “I’ll come back this afternoon.”

  In the lobby, he summoned the elevator, then pushed the button for it to descend without him. He hoped Schwartz could hear the chime in Rosen’s office. He then ducked beside the stairway and waited. Twenty minutes later, Schwartz poked his head out of Rosen’s office and looked up and down the hallway before hustling for the stairs. He was looking over his shoulder when Plennie lurched out from his hiding place.

  Even as a kid, Plennie had never been in a fistfight with anyone but family, and he wasn’t sure he knew how. But his arms seemed to act without his volition. A fire raged inside him as he pounded Schwartz about the face and skull. He landed blow after blow as the man begged him to stop. In the struggle he somehow managed to hook his thumb in Schwartz’s mouth and pulled out his dentures. Schwartz fell to the ground and Plennie kept slugging him, demanding his part of the money.

  “I don’t have it!” Schwartz screamed as the blows fell.

  The beating did not stop until Schwartz said he’d give Plennie everything he had. Plennie let him up off the ground and Schwartz started fumbling around in his pockets. He eventually produced six crumpled dollar bills.

  Plennie snatched the money, and the rage came back up in his throat. Schwartz tried to scramble away, down the stairs, but Plennie was on top of him like a cat, scratching and kicking him now. At the bottom of two flights of stairs, Schwartz broke away and ran outside and down the street as fast as he could.

  Plennie checked himself for injuries. His knuckles were busted and his heart was pounding, but otherwise he was fine. He tossed Schwartz’s bridgework on the sidewalk and looked again at the money. Six measly bucks.

  The scuffle had caused a scene. He was trying to decide what to do next when a police officer spotted him. Schwartz had flagged down the cop and made a complaint. The cop cuffed Plennie, drove him to headquarters, and put him in a cell by himself on a charge of aggravated assault. There he remained for an hour before a group of the merchants who heard about the beating paid his $100 bail.

  Schwartz and his lawyer showed up at Plennie’s hearing the next morning. Plennie pleaded his own case, calling on the merchants to testify that Schwartz had collected the money. He argued that he didn’t owe Schwartz any money for his broken bridgework and most certainly had not robbed him, as Schwartz’s lawyer contended. He told the judge he was still angry about being swindled and he’d get even with Schwartz, no matter how long it took.

  “I believe you will,” the judge said. “I am not going to fine you or Schwartz. I can’t make him pay what he has not got. But Mr. Schwartz did you an injustice, so I’m going to let him pay for his own bridgework.”

  Plennie was free, and as broke as he was when he arrived.

  * * *

  Back in New York, he told his friend Walton the whole story.

>   “The thing I liked the best was the way you beat the hell out of that crook,” Walton said. “If I’d known what was going on I’d have come over and helped you out.”

  “You’ve done more than enough for me already,” Plennie replied.

  He was still in dire need. He had the $11 he’d had when he arrived, plus $12 from postcard sales in Elizabeth, plus the $6 he’d taken off Schwartz. All together it wasn’t nearly enough to pay for passage on a ship to London.

  He received a letter from his mother that made him crave home like nothing else. She was worried about him. She wrote that she’d had a dream the night before so real it stole her breath. In it, Plennie walked into her bedroom and sat down, and they had a nice conversation, just chatting like old times. When she woke, there was an empty space where he sat.

  As he was on the edge of giving up, a thought struck him. He’d met a man, Paul Jones, on the highway outside Philadelphia. Jones was interested in his stunt and told Plennie he worked for the Hood Rubber Company, and maybe there was a chance the heel and sole department of the company was in need of some advertising. He gave Plennie the name of a colleague in New York, C. H. Carpenter. He was Plennie’s last hope.

  Carpenter was glad to see him, even had a postcard sitting on his desk when Plennie arrived, courtesy of Paul Jones, Philadelphia. Carpenter didn’t have work but suggested Plennie keep walking north, to Boston, to visit P. R. Drew, head of the heel and sole department at the main factory. The recommendation was a glimmer of hope, two hundred miles away.

  “It’s a good lead,” Walton told Plennie, adding that he’d enjoy the walk through New England. “It’s beautiful country and the people are friendly.”

  Plennie and Walton tooled around New York for the next few days while Plennie weighed his options. They saw the World Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden and met up with a couple of cowboys from Abilene. They ate in Chinatown and visited an opium den, where green-eyed men smoked long pipes and looked to be in the throes of fever dreams. They walked across the brand-new George Washington Bridge, which had just recently opened to traffic and was used on its first day by 56,000 vehicles and 100,000 pedestrians. And they visited the flamboyant mayor, Jimmy Walker, a proud moment that Plennie would talk about for the rest of his life.

  “Well, if he walked backward all the way just to get my autograph,” Walker said, “he certainly deserves it.”

  Plennie bragged to his mother in a letter. “So you can see that I can get something done when I try, can’t I?” he wrote. “I feel like I am going to make good and don’t intend to ever give up until I back into Fort Worth, Tex.”

  Walker was easily the most famous person he’d ever met and he equated the encounter with success, writing to many friends and family about it.

  “I don’t blame you for being proud of having his signature,” replied Hilda Beck of Fostoria, Ohio, whom Plennie had met in the Midwest. “I would be proud of it too.”

  The following Tuesday, Plennie put on his hat and glasses and grabbed his cane and new stack of postcards and walked into the Western Union to continue his journey. When the stationmaster stamped his booklet, he started up the street toward Yonkers, family on his mind.

  He’d been dreaming about Della and Vivian. Since her last letter in Pennsylvania, demanding he come home, he often engaged in mental subterfuge. He told himself his own affairs had soured. If he’d had surplus, he would’ve sent it home. “I was having trouble enough to keep going without having extra money to send to her,” he would later write, “but to tell her so would only add to her ire, so I decided to remain silent.” In a letter to his sister, he’d tried to explain himself:

  Yes, Lula Mae, it almost kills me to think of Della and Vivian in the way that I have to think of them. I thought I was doing this to suit them but I have decided that they never did like the idea and would not tell me until I left home. But I guess if I had made good it would have been all okay with them. Well, I am going to make good all right, but it may be a long time before I do. I think after I have finished my trip I will have plenty of money but I will have my hard time while I am doing the trip.

  The fact that Della was living with her own family, and he couldn’t imagine her people letting her go without, helped stifle his guilt.

  He would press on, backward.

  He had made his decision, come what might.

  Two hundred miles to Boston.

  20.

  Reverse in Wedded State

  In June 1630, the tall ship Arbella was coming to anchor in Salem Harbor after a harrowing three-thousand-mile journey from England. Arbella was the flagship in an eleven-vessel fleet carrying a thousand Puritans on the front end of the earliest great migration in the new land’s written history. A few other colonies had been planted and were deemed successful, thanks mostly to replenishment by immigrants. Jamestown, Virginia, despite “the starving time,” had survived. The Pilgrims up in Maine complained of “muskeeto” bites and lost half their population when a hundred people died that first winter, but they were making it. A fishing village had begun to thrive at Cape Ann. By the time the Arbella made anchor, about seven thousand English settlers were living along the Atlantic coast, and their survival had become a beacon for those across the sea. Settlement in the New World remained dangerous and difficult, but for those on the margins in England, America was a land of pristine hope.

  By and large, none of the early settlers had organized governments, but to avert the anarchy or dictatorships from which they’d fled, they had all agreed to abide by an expressed common will. It was a simple solution, perhaps uniquely British, and it was a fix that would be repeated again and again by the settlers of America, grafting democracy into the new world.

  Aboard the Arbella stood John Winthrop, forty-one, leader of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which aimed to plant a new colony with an organized government. Winthrop observed disorder among his shipmates long before they saw the shoreline of the New World. One seasick maid “drank so much strong water, that she was senseless,” Winthrop wrote in his diary, “and had near killed herself. We observed it a common fault in our young people, that they gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately.” Later, someone found out that a servant was conducting a dubious economy. He was buying biscuits off a boy, marking them up, and reselling them to other servants. “We caused his hands to be tied up to a bar,” Winthrop wrote, “and hanged a basket with stones about his neck, and so he stood two hours.” So it was that alcoholism, youthful abandon, financial chicanery, and punitive justice were imported to the colonies. Before landfall, perhaps to set things straight, Winthrop wrote a memorable sermon in which he spelled out his ideas for the new settlement. Chief among them was this: take care of one another, and don’t be selfish and greedy. Those who seek riches for themselves alone, he wrote, will receive the wrath of God.

  “Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man,” he wrote. “We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”

  The next part would lay the groundwork for a doctrine of American exceptionalism that would define the country for centuries to come. It would for generations be on the tongues of men who would at times forget or ignore the first precipitants about community and liberality.

  “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop wrote. “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

 
The members of the Massachusetts Bay Company disembarked, and Winthrop, the colony’s first governor, settled at Boston and set about taking slaves and banning gambling, adultery, and Christmas.

  And so it came to pass that almost exactly three hundred years later, on December 23, a man from Texas walked backward up the steps to Boston City Hall at 5:30 p.m. and pulled on locked doors.

  They’re at a Christmas party, said a man nearby. Why don’t you try the back doors?

  He did, and he found them unlocked, and as he backed down a hallway he came upon Wilford J. Doyle, Boston city clerk, and J. P. Meahoney, secretary to the mayor, who saw to it immediately that he was part of the city employee Christmas party. The basement was packed with people, mostly elderly women, who began doting upon and fussing over young Plennie L. Wingo of Abilene. He was full of stories, and they were happy to hear.

  He had backed up US Highway 1 through Yonkers and New Rochelle, and stopped at Stamford, Connecticut, to advertise a vaudeville act opening at the Strand Theater, twenty dollars for two days’ work. He’d gotten a letter from the Strand manager to present to his cousin, who worked for Paramount Pictures in Berlin, should Plennie make it as far as Germany. He’d gained the autograph of Stamford mayor Joseph P. Boyle, and gotten his picture in the newspaper shaking the hand of Bridgeport mayor Edward T. Buckingham behind his back. He’d advertised again in New Haven, for a movie called Local Boy Makes Good at the Roger Sherman Theater, and the coincidence wasn’t lost on Plennie. He’d eaten fried smelts at a café outside New Haven, and they were delicious. In several towns, his reputation had preceded him, and curious onlookers had lined roadsides, cheering as he blew by. Reporters hustled to keep up with him. He’d paused for a night in Providence, Rhode Island, for two reasons: he wanted to hike the entire way to Boston in a single day, so he needed good rest, and he had to meet with a lawyer.