The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  I am going to try to make some real money on the rest of my trip. I come back over some of the road that I walked over last year and I was recognized by several people. Dad, you must be careful with that truck and not get hurt for the roads are dangerous now. I am sure glad you didn’t get hurt the other day in that wreck. Mother, I know I should have wrote you from N.Y. but I had in mind to come straight home and supprise you. How is everyone? I hope all are well.

  This fellow I am with now is a real good fellow and seems like I have known him a long time allready, he’s so friendly. Aunt Nola and all sure like him. If I can I am going to try to get him to come by home. I know you all will like him, too.

  Well, we are getting ready to go to town so I will close for this time. Lots of love to all and I hope I will be able to see you soon. The Lord has been with me all the way through and I am so happy to get back.

  —Plennie

  He visited his aunt again in Chicago, and in Los Angeles he took in the Summer Olympics and palled around more with his new friend Charles Carlson, splitting gas and a hotel room, and failing to mention in later writings where he got the money to pay for them.

  * * *

  He looked over the railing of the Santa Monica Pier and out at the infinite blue before him, and dropped a pebble into the Pacific Ocean. The date was August 13, 1932, and 1,450 miles spooled out between him and that healthy purse in Fort Worth and whatever else life might hold. He had gained a certain maturity that comes to those who leave their hometowns to face the world. He looked different. The portraits of Plennie that ran in the California newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union portrayed a thinner, more serious man, one who had broken a few promises, shed the goofy smile of last year, and stood now with a confidence. He bore the expression of a man running for office rather than walking backward across the desert. He finally looked a little around the eyes like the Okie migrants on the dusty shoulders of the California byways, like the first and last of a kind.

  The backing was old hat now, and he made good time toward San Diego, thinking he’d drop down south and take Highway 80 east to Abilene, then Fort Worth. The evidence of his change surfaced in Anaheim, when he stopped at a filling station to get a drink and a crowd gathered around him. Some bought cards and others asked questions and he didn’t mind the money or attention. A bullish police officer interrupted the scene.

  “You will have to get on out of town,” the cop said. “We don’t allow your kind to stop here.” Then he turned to the crowd. “Break it up!” he shouted. “Scatter!”

  The old Plennie might’ve slunk away apologetically, happy to stay out of trouble. But a year on the road had planted a seed of rebellion, or obstinacy, or something. Plennie told the cop he knew his rights, and this was not a foreign country.

  “Since when is it against the law for a man to walk backwards through any town?” he asked. He said he would leave when he was good and ready. “If that don’t suit you, let’s see what you can do about it.” The crowd around them had grown in the sixty seconds since the cop had approached. Someone booed. More people joined in, shouting at the officer now. He appeared for a moment to consider his options and, finding but one, he walked toward his vehicle, climbed in, and sped away from the group of people at the filling station, who were cheering and clapping on the back a thin, ragged-eyed dirt-trooper.

  * * *

  The late-August desert was brutal, and he suffered the 120-degree heat, especially at night, as he tried to sleep on the roadside or in stuffy hotel rooms. He brought along a feather pillow, blanket, and Thermos, preparations for the trek through the desolation. He enjoyed meeting strangers in the small towns but hated to see so many on the edge of life, living among the shuttered bank buildings and dusty main streets and towns that seemed ready to blow off the maps. He dropped into Mexico for a drink a time or two, and he slept a handful of nights under the Southwestern stars.

  On the outskirts of Phoenix he was overtaken by a lawman.

  “It’s against the law to walk backwards within the city limits,” the man said. “You are under arrest.”

  The thing that frightened Plennie this time around was the officer’s direct certitude. He was abrupt and surprisingly violent when he shoved Plennie into the car. When they arrived at the jail, atop the courthouse, the deputy let on that there was one other prisoner, a tough criminal named Ruth Judd. Plennie knew the name. The whole country knew about the Trunk Murders, as the papers called them. Winnie Ruth Judd stood accused of shooting her two friends, cutting one into pieces, and packing both into trunks before traveling with the friend-bearing luggage from Phoenix to Los Angeles. It was, perhaps, the most sensational murder story of 1931, involving infidelity, drug addiction, and sex perversion.

  “I’m going to put you in the cell next to her,” the officer said, clutching Plennie’s arm, “and you two can get acquainted.”

  Plennie found his voice at the last minute and asked to place a phone call, which the cop considered. “I suppose there would be no harm,” he said. He escorted Plennie back downstairs, and there stood his old friend Jim Thurmond, who used to own a café in Abilene, and the Phoenix police chief W. C. LeFebvre, and Oren Arnold, a writer for the local newspaper, all of them bent over laughing.

  * * *

  A writer in Phoenix did a bang-up job on a lengthy story, complete with illustrations and factual errors, which ran in Sunday feature sections in many newspapers, including the Washington Post. “Now he is about to claim that fat purse of money,” the reporter wrote.

  The photographs taken of him must run into the thousands, he says. The questions asked him surely run to a million.

  The one question asked him more than any other—the one which he has heard from little children, from octogenarians, from Mayors and Governors, from Portuguese and Viennese, from Swiss and Spanish, Turk and German, from everybody everywhere, is, “What are you doing it for?”

  And even Plennie Wingo himself is a little hazy on the answer!

  That is, his reason doesn’t sound convincing. Because, simply, there is no very definite reason other than the haphazard promise of a purse when he returns to Fort Worth and the fact that he faced unemployment anyway.

  The real reason probably is, Plennie admits, that he wanted to do some adventuring. And this idea, silly as it sounds, presented an inexpensive way to go about it.

  But having done it once, Plennie can face old age and senility with a wealth of memories and a thick notebook filled with important autographs, seals, photos and clippings.

  None of the stories out west mentioned his family, or his divorce, or the shambles of the life to which he was about to return.

  Of course, none of them knew what he carried in his pocket, either. And he wasn’t going to tell.

  While he was killing time in Istanbul, he got to thinking about the woman he’d met in Baxter Springs, Kansas, the one whose brute of a husband was interested in murdering him. Irene was her name, and she was a beauty. Anyway, he had promised that night in the spring of 1931 to send a postcard, and so he did, fitting as much as he could about his adventure into the space provided and telling her that he might start his walk again in Los Angeles or San Francisco, but that he’d be checking his mail in New York City if she wanted to write back. So when he got to New York, he went to the post office after his mail and was utterly surprised to find that she had written, and it was a long letter, and he kept it.

  * * *

  He wrote to his mother on September 15, 1932, from Globe, Arizona, to congratulate her on opening a vegetable stand, and to say that he was in the mountains, 335 miles from El Paso, Texas, and would be home soon. He wrote that he had killed a rattlesnake as long as his cane, with seven rattles, like he had done when he was just a boy, and that he was unafraid.

  * * *

  West Texas is too big a place for everybody to know everybody, but small enough that everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else. Once he hit the border, he had friend
s or family in practically every town. He stayed with Frank Kane in El Paso, had a drink across the border in Juárez, Mexico, at the Cantina La Luna Azul, and slept sitting up in a phone booth somewhere east of there on account of the pack of coyotes closing in. He bumped into his old pal Ben Oden, who operated a cantaloupe truck, at the Western Union in Pecos. His aunt Hattie put him up in Big Spring, where he bought a new suit to look nice and convinced the head man at a department store to give him a new pair of shoes in exchange for his old ones and the stories attached. He left his twelfth pair of brogans in the department store window in Big Spring and wore his thirteenth toward Abilene.

  Far fewer people lined the streets for Plennie than for Colonel Lindbergh, but he arrived as the high school was letting out for the day, and that felt like an excited crowd.

  Vivian had graduated the year before, and Plennie had missed it, but he saw three of her friends. He recognized them from Vivian’s birthday party, the kids who were talking about how everything under the sun had been accomplished, how there were no more records to break.

  “We never thought you would do it,” one of them said.

  One of Plennie’s brothers showed up too, and clapped his back a bunch. Della and Vivian came to greet him, and invited him home if he needed a place to stay. Vivian had been working as a hostess in a hotel coffee shop, and Della was working part-time as a private nurse at a hospital. They were doing okay.

  The writer for the Abilene Morning Reporter-News pointed out that although Mr. and Mrs. Wingo were divorced since last January, they were on speaking terms. “Friendly,” Plennie called it.

  The reporter asked the usual questions. Plennie said he felt great physically, and that he’d dropped from 166 pounds to 130. He was still hoping to make Fort Worth in ten days to collect. Why had he done it? He still didn’t have a sharp answer, but it was getting better.

  “I just had a notion to see the world in a manner never before used,” Plennie said. “My friends kidded me about it, and that made me all the more determined to carry out my plan. A few times I would get a bit discouraged, but never at any time did I lose my determination to stick it out. I wore out twelve pairs of shoes, most of them half-soled several times, and now I am wearing the thirteenth pair. I walked backward about seven thousand miles, saw most of America and Europe, added, I believe, ten years to my life, managed to eat every day, met thousands of interesting people, saw many wonderful sights—and have nothing to regret.”

  The reporter pointed out that a “wealthy Italian, taking a shine to the determined young Texan, paid his passage first-class from Istanbul to Marseilles and put him up at the finest hotel in that French port for a full week.”

  Ceretle, or whoever he was, was a phantom now, and who knows what was in those trunks?

  Plennie tried to assess his journey, physical and emotional, but it was hard to squeeze all he had seen and done into a quote. The reporter scrambled to keep up as he spoke.

  “People ask me what I expect to get out of it,” Plennie said. “Well, I did something everybody said I couldn’t do—or at least I demonstrated that it could be done. That’s some satisfaction. I expect to write a book of my experiences and there should be some monetary reward in that. I paid my expenses by selling postcards, acting as a sandwich man to advertise various business houses, and otherwise earned money.

  “I hope the Fort Worth people will reward me in some way, for I put in some good advertising for Fort Worth. And for Abilene, too,” he said. “But whether I realize any material benefit, I’ll always have the satisfaction of doing something nobody else ever did.”

  * * *

  There was never any promise of a purse in Fort Worth. He had lied about that.

  He felt like it would help people understand why he was doing something abnormal, because that question—why?—drives us all, and even those of us who aren’t walking backward need a satisfying answer. Plennie perfected his response later in life, developing a quip that made no sense and was perfectly understandable.

  “With the whole world going backwards,” he would say, “maybe the only way to see it was to turn around.”

  He arrived in Fort Worth on October 24, 1932, after one year, six months, nine days, four hours, and twelve minutes. He’d backpedaled more than five thousand miles.

  A. C. Farmer, the first man to sign his book, was still at the Western Union.

  “That’s amazing,” Farmer said when he saw Plennie.

  He walked down to the chamber of commerce and there sat Charles Cotten, still on the job, surprised to see Plennie back, ashamed that he had nothing to offer.

  “We have tried every which way to figure out some means of rewarding you,” Cotten said, “but I am sorry to say there is nothing we can do.”

  Plennie understood. Besides, what recourse did he have?

  He was glad to finish, glad to be back in Texas. He had four dollar bills in his pocket, a poor man’s fortune. He could have, that very month, on the terrible downhill slope of what had been the most expensive orgy in history, bought four healthy sheep.

  Mathematically, he had started with nothing, and therefore had nothing to lose, and he had traveled for more than a year and a half through nine countries, slept in nice hotels, met interesting people, and never missed a meal. And he had made four dollars.

  You could do worse.

  Epilogue

  My first guest, now listen to this. His name is Plennie Wingo. P-L-E-N-N-I-E W-I-N-G-O,” Johnny Carson said. It was late July of 1976, on a television program called The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. “And Mr. Wingo once set a record for walking across the United States, Europe, and part of Asia. Now, the remarkable thing about it was that it was an eight-thousand-mile trek. He did it walking backwards. That’s true.”

  There was mild giggling. Someone in the audience whistled.

  “Now, that happened forty-five years ago, and Plennie, I understand, is now eighty-one years of age, and is in training to walk across the United States, backwards,” Carson said. “I thought you might like to meet this man, and find out why. Would you please welcome, Plennie Wingo.”

  An elderly Plennie walked backward onto the stage a little awkwardly, toward the audience first, then swerving back toward Carson, who stood to greet him. Plennie was wearing a sharp crimson suit and a spotless felt cowboy hat. On his face he wore glasses with small round mirrors protruding from the brackets. He was eighty-one years old and still trying to squeeze money out of his stunt.

  “Get a close-up of that, Bob, the glasses here,” Carson said. “He’s got little rearview mirrors on each, on each…Well, Plennie, we’ve talked about you a lot this week.”

  “Have you?” Plennie smiled.

  “Yeah, I find it fascinating,” Carson said. “Now that looks easy to do, walking backwards. Is it easy to do?”

  “Well, it wasn’t to start with,” Plennie said. “It wouldn’t be easy to anyone who hasn’t practiced it.”

  “Yeah?” Carson was feeling his guest out, searching for comfort and timing in the exchange. “Why…When did you get this idea? It was forty-five years ago?”

  “Yes, forty-five years ago,” Plennie said.

  * * *

  Where does a man pick up when his journey ends?

  Plennie was not welcome at home in Abilene. The divorce was not just a judgment but a lifestyle. So he moved to Archer City, Texas, and took a job as cook at a little café, the old routine. Within a few years, Vivian joined him and went to work there too, which seemed natural because as a baby her father would put her to sleep in a bassinet under the counter of his own café in Abilene. In the late 1930s, Della moved to Archer City as well, and the patches on their relationship held pretty good. They even got remarried.

  Somewhere around that time the family developed a new nickname for Plennie. They began calling him Blackie, and his descendants would come to understand that it was a reference to him being the wayward black sheep among his siblings. He was the unusual one, prone to
take strong drink, and there were persistent rumors about gambling jags and financial problems. But Texans tend to mind their own business, and Plennie was grown enough to make his own bad decisions.

  Plennie and Della opened another café soon after, at Kadane Corner, west of Wichita Falls. But in 1941, just before world war broke out again, the patches wore thin and they divorced again and abandoned their café and all its promise.

  That’s when Plennie disappeared. No one heard from him for several years, which was odd because theirs was a family of correspondents, and they routinely circulated a progressive letter, passing updates from one household to the next by the US Mail.

  Plennie resurfaced in the fall of 1943, when his sister’s doorbell rang in Arcadia, California. “I answered the door and to my amazement Blackie was standing on our doorstep, looking for all the world as though he sure needed love from our family,” wrote his sister, Dee Wingo Miles, much later. “He worked and stayed in Los Angeles for several months and visited us often.”

  In the fall of 1945, he returned to Texas and went to work in another café, this one in a little town called Olney, and it was there he fell in love with a young, plump waitress. The waitress would often repeat their love story, how Plennie had invited her outside the café one night to behold the beauty of a rare star hovering so near to the Texas moon, surrounded by some kind of supernatural circle. The newspaper reported the next day that it wasn’t a star, but Venus, and it was sixteen million miles from the moon, as it was every twenty-two months. Nonetheless, after a short romance, three days after Valentine’s Day in 1946, Plennie Wingo, who was fifty-one, married Juanita Billingsley, who was just eighteen and nearly twice his size.

  Plennie Wingo and his wife, Juanita Billingsley Wingo, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Undated. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)