The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  That afternoon, Mazza had a surprise. They loaded back into the car and drove a few miles to Sportsman’s Park, on Grand Boulevard, on the north side of the city, to watch the Cardinals from St. Louis play the Giants from New York in front of 27,611 fans. The day was gorgeous, with highs in the low eighties. Plennie watched his first major-league baseball game with the eyes of a child. The Giants tied the game at seven in the top of the ninth; then the Cardinals drove in a run in the tenth to win and the place came alive with a sound Plennie had never heard before, a scream from twenty-six thousand throats.

  The newspapers were selling quick around the stadium when the game turned out. The headline, big and bold and stretched all the way across the front of 1A, wasn’t exactly shocking, but it was something. CAPONE INDICTED FOR EVADING TAX ON $1,038,654, it read.

  The Feds had been investigating the man called “Scarface Al” for two years. They had questioned more than a thousand people, and the only evidence of crime they could use to bring a case was that Capone owed $215,089 in back taxes on underground earnings between 1924 and 1929. Capone had turned himself in at the federal courthouse in Chicago earlier that day, accompanied by his lawyer. Elsewhere on the front page, John B. Huesmann, a laborer, died from a skull fracture, becoming the seventy-seventh person in the city to be struck and killed by a car since January 1. And there were two apparent suicides in St. Louis, a demoted railroad clerk who jumped out a sixth-story window at Broadway and Pine, and a real estate agent who had become “inactive in business” a year before and was found forty-eight hours after death, lying beside a shotgun. In sports, Babe Ruth had homered in the ninth inning, his tenth home run of the season, pushing the Yankees past the St. Louis Browns in New York.

  Back at the mansion, Pete Mazza broke out his booze again. They had a drink, then another; then Mazza said, “Come on, let’s go to the club.”

  Speakeasies had been the target of intense prosecution, but it seemed like every time one place was shuttered, another opened somewhere else. Police were just wasting money. New York’s new police commissioner, Grover Whalen, launched an effort to crack down, raiding fifty-five speakeasies. According to the wiseacre press, that left just 29,945 more in the city to raid.

  Pete Mazza and Plennie pulled up to one in St. Louis after dark and walked to the door. Mazza introduced Plennie as his guest and they ducked inside. Plennie had never seen such a place. He gazed around through thick smoke. Women in short dresses puffed on cigarettes and clinked glasses. Men rolled dice and ringed poker tables two deep as dealers dealt twenty-one. Slot machines lined the walls. Mazza led Plennie to a pool table, where they played a few games. This was a day of firsts. The drinks flowed.

  They left the club at 1 a.m., the Missouri cityscape blurring by outside the car. Plennie looked at Mazza.

  “Believe me,” he said, “if I had a home as nice as yours, I’d be staying home all the time.”

  Mazza surprised him. Maybe the liquor had loosened him up.

  “You don’t know how lonely it gets around here,” he said. “I used to have a family and felt the way you do. But things have changed.”

  There was no stopping him now. He told Plennie how he’d come over from Italy, settled in St. Louis, got a job as a butcher. He worked long hours to get ahead, saving money, neglecting his family.

  “I was a good provider, but I was too busy to spend time with them,” he said. “One day, my wife told me she had decided to quit me and go back to her home in Italy with the children. Now I have the controlling interest in the plant, the largest in the city, with all the business I can handle. But I’m all alone. I try to be happy, but I can’t.”

  Mazza had become a very wealthy man, but money doesn’t mean much when your wife and kids are gone. Plennie could relate to part of that.

  “That’s why I keep inviting people like yourself to come and spend a little time with me,” Mazza said.

  The next morning, Plennie said goodbye to Pete Mazza and thanked him for everything, telling him what a pleasure it had been to visit with him. Mazza said the pleasure was his and he handed Plennie an envelope, sealed. “Keep this with you,” he said. “Don’t open it unless you are in need of help.”

  * * *

  The next day’s newspaper carried an update:

  ST. LOUIS, Mo.—It’s kind of lucky for the engineer that Plennie L. Wingo is a man instead of a ship, because the way Plennie is walking around the world, he’s going astern when he’s going forward and he’d have to signal starboard when he wanted to turn port.

  Plennie is planning to walk around the world—backwards, and already has walked that way from his home in Abilene, Texas, to this city.

  As his eyes are normally placed, they’re useless for seeing ahead—or should it be astern?—so he is equipped with “periscope” rear-vision goggles, the wide windows of which enable him to see what is coming toward him when he looks as though he was walking away from it.

  He’s the only man able to see both front and rear at the same time, anyway, because the special goggles have extraordinary glass in their center lenses so he can see what’s behind him when it is in front of him, and the side-mirrors reflect what is in front of him when it’s behind him.

  His rate of progress is about three miles an hour when he’s going full steam ahead in reverse.

  13.

  Don’t Stop

  The fellow in the tollbooth on the Eads Bridge wouldn’t take his money.

  “Aren’t you the man who walks backwards?” the man said.

  “That’s me,” Plennie replied.

  “Well, sir, you get to walk across the bridge without paying the dime.”

  Plennie thanked him and sold him a postcard, then started across, the first person he or anybody had ever heard of crossing the Mississippi River backward. He was halfway across the bridge, an engineering marvel envisioned and financed by a young Andrew Carnegie sixty years before, when he suddenly recalled the stories his grandpa used to tell about the Mississippi. He could practically hear the old man’s voice settling into the story about how Grandma learned she could swim. She’d never before been in water deeper than a bathtub. But they’d been fishing the Mississippi in a johnboat when she hooked a massive catfish. In the process of wrestling the monster aboard, the boat turned over, and both parties went into the drink. “Swim or drown,” Grandpa said. “Come on, Ma.” When he reached the shore he finally checked to see if she was okay. There was Grandma, right behind him. They were both still alive and kicking back home.

  Plennie wasn’t more than a half mile into East St. Louis, Illinois, when he caught in his mirrors the stare of a big policeman. Something about the man’s look told Plennie he was about to be stopped. He kept pacing backward until he saw the officer’s big hand go up in his mirrors. He whipped around at the last moment, facing forward, before the cop could touch him. The harassment was getting tiring.

  “You can’t walk backward here,” the cop said.

  Of course. Plennie could see that the officer was somehow perturbed. Who knows why? Plennie explained yet again who he was and what he was doing, that he’d come backward 672 miles so far without issue or harm, but the cop was having none of it and demanded he turn around.

  “You might get hurt,” the officer said.

  This was a city that had recently been through a period of great upheaval. The buildup to the war had sucked many laborers into active duty, and they’d been replaced by African-Americans migrating out of the Jim Crow South. By the spring of 1917, blacks were arriving in St. Louis at a rate of two thousand per week, many of them finding work with the Aluminum Ore Company and the American Steel Company, and in the East St. Louis rail yards, the nexus of dozens of regional lines. They were also called in to break strikes, adding to racial tensions that were already boiling by May 1917, when the National Guard was summoned to help disperse a violent march on the city by three thousand white men.

  The bloodshed began in early July. A car full of whites drove through
the black neighborhood, firing at houses. When a police unit accompanied by a local reporter drove to the same neighborhood to investigate, the residents opened fire on the car, killing one detective and mortally wounding another. The cops parked the bullet-riddled car in front of the police station the next morning, then stood by while the white residents got their vengeance. They set fire to homes of blacks, then shot the residents as they fled. Others they lynched. Six thousand black residents were left homeless. The death toll climbed to nine whites and at least thirty-nine blacks. The police were never held to account. “All the impartial witnesses agree that the police were either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities, and that the major part of the National Guard was indifferent or inactive,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “No organized effort was made to protect the Negroes or disperse the murdering groups. The lack of frenzy and of a large infuriated mob made the task easy. Ten determined officers could have prevented most of the outrages. One hundred men acting with authority and vigor might have prevented any outrage.” Ten thousand blacks marched in silent protest down Fifth Avenue in New York. Marcus Garvey said it was “time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.” The city would be marked permanently by the event, and well into the next century whites would follow an unspoken rule of never stopping in East St. Louis.

  Here, fourteen years after the violence, stood a man wearing the uniform of that apathetic organization, now concerned about the well-being of a fellow walking backward.

  Plennie, in his nicest Texan voice, tried again to explain, said he appreciated immensely the good officer’s concern, but he had navigated the entirety of the city of St. Louis proper without getting hurt, and, by and large, without police escort, and he felt certain he could get by all right here. He read nothing but obstinacy on the cop’s face. So Plennie scanned the sidewalk for a stone and drew a line on the sidewalk where he’d stopped. He faced forward, brushed past the cop, and proceeded to City Hall. There, driven by no small amount of frustration, he asked to see the police chief, got a quick audience, and laid out his situation. The chief laughed.

  “Sure, I’ve been reading about you, Mr. Wingo,” he said. “I’m sure if you got through St. Louis alive, you’ll be safe enough here.”

  The chief grabbed a pen from his desk, scratched a note on a piece of letterhead, and handed it to Plennie. “If anyone stops you, just show him this.”

  Back outside, back across town, back to his line on the sidewalk. He turned and began backpedaling. Sure enough, there was the exact same cop, waiting. Even more upset, the officer grabbed Plennie by the collar. “I thought I told you…” he said through gritted teeth.

  Plennie reached into his jacket and held the note up to the officer. The cop’s face grew red as he read the note. When he finished, he shoved it back into Plennie’s chest.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and break your fool neck for all I care.”

  An article appeared in the next edition of the St. Louis Star, on the front page, along with stories about Germany asking America to forgive reparations, and ten thousand striking miners in western Pennsylvania rioting against police:

  Backward Hiker Has Run-In With Cop

  Plennie L. Wingo, Abilene, Tex., who left Fort Worth April 15 in an attempt to walk around the world backward, ran into difficulty with East St. Louis police today. As he neared the east end of Eads Bridge, Patrolman Patrick Ryan stopped him and inquired: “What are you doing?”

  After Wingo explained, Ryan said, “You can’t walk backward here, you might get hurt.”

  Wingo turned around and walked forward until he found police headquarters and Chief of Police James A. Leahy. Explaining the situation to the chief, Wingo was told he might walk through the city any way he wanted to. The hiker returned to the point of his interrupted walk and resumed his backward march.

  * * *

  Plennie’s aunt lived in Chicago, which was only about 260 miles away, as the crow flies. He was already planning to take a little break, to get good and fed by kin. And Chicago seemed like another decent place to try to land a sponsor.

  He was on his way, about ten miles outside of East St. Louis on Route 66, when yet another cop pulled off the highway and stopped. The Illinois highway patrolman inquired about the nonsense, then informed Plennie that he was in violation of some state law prohibiting backward walking on Illinois roadways.

  “You get off and don’t let me catch you on again,” the patrolman said.

  The edict was disappointing, but it wasn’t like Plennie could just bypass the entire state. He waited until the officer was well out of sight, then again faced the south and began backing up. He never saw the patrolman again.

  He stopped long enough in Edwardsville to get a haircut and a bite to eat, to give his story to a reporter for the Edwardsville Intelligencer, to check in at the Western Union, and to get a new set of toe plates put on his shoes, his seventeenth set so far. He backed through Worden and Staunton and Honey Bend, Waggoner, Farmersville, Thomasville, Divernon, Glenarm, and Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln lived until 1861, when he left to take a job as the sixteenth president of the United States.

  There had amassed in the state’s capital that day an unusual band of pedestrians from all corners of Illinois, calling themselves the Hunger Marchers. More than three hundred unemployed men had been unceremoniously corralled by the state police despite having been officially invited to address the House of Representatives. Their complaint was common. They wanted the state to pass a worker unemployment bill, giving some social relief to the thousands of citizens who couldn’t find work. Nationwide, more than six million men were unemployed. Even though the federal government planned to spend $780 million on public works projects that year (up from $260 million in 1928), and even though more than ten million veterans and government employees were supported in some way by the taxpayers, millions more went hungry. Many, including the Hunger Marchers, looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration. The hard times called for some sort of social security, but President Hoover was having none of it. The private sector, through charity and jobs, could handle the crisis.

  “I am opposed to any direct or indirect Government dole,” he said in his annual address of 1931. “The breakdown and increased unemployment in Europe is due in part to such practices. Our people are providing against distress from unemployment in true American fashion by a magnificent response to public appeal and by action of the local governments.”

  As Plennie backed out of town under a blistering sun, the president himself was headed toward Springfield by train, part of a Midwestern tour of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The day before, Hoover had joined former President Calvin Coolidge to dedicate the tomb of Warren G. Harding in Marion, Ohio, the small town that saw Harding’s rise from newspaper editor to president. They honored the scandal-tainted Harding by casting him as a good man betrayed by friends he trusted, and even suggested that the betrayal had led to his early death. Hoover’s creativity was controversial.

  Now Hoover was scheduled to tour Lincoln’s old home and deliver an address at the Emancipator’s tomb. Security was tight, with extra law officers and mounted police scrutinizing anyone who looked suspicious. An African-American choir sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” while Boy Scouts scooped water out of buckets for the perspiring Civil War veterans seated near the stage. While a crowd turned out for Hoover’s arrival, it wasn’t nearly as big as the seventy-five thousand predicted, and, as reporters noted, those lining the streets “failed to applaud vigorously.” Such was Hoover’s predicament.

  In the hilly college town of Bloomington, Plennie decided to call for his mail. He was expecting a package of postcards. It caught him off guard when the postal clerk recognized him.

  “You are the man that is walking around the world backwards, aren’t you?” the clerk said. His name was Bert Kelly, and without missing a beat he invited Plennie to sleep the night at his house. He said it w
ould be his pleasure. He lived with his parents and had plenty of room.

  “You’ll be very welcome and comfortable,” Kelly said. “And I’d like my dad and mother to meet you, too.”

  Plennie gave in and the two walked a few blocks to his home. Bert Kelly’s mother and father were sitting in the shade of the front porch, trying to keep cool in a record-setting heat wave.

  “Would you do me a great favor?” Bert asked.

  “Yes,” Plennie replied. “If I can.”

  “Walk backwards up to the house,” Bert said.

  “Why do you ask that?” Plennie said. The request seemed queer.

  “Would you?” Bert said. “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Of course,” Plennie said. “If that’s what you want.”

  He turned his back to the couple and reversed up the walkway, watching in his mirrors as the old folks began to whisper. They shouted in unison, like children. “You’re the backwards man!”

  They invited the backwards man in for supper, and as they ate, Plennie learned that Bert had decided not to marry so he could stay home and take care of his parents. It struck him as a kind and noble act, in keeping with the Fifth Commandment. Plennie couldn’t help but think of his own folks back home. A vicious wind- and hailstorm had swept through West Texas over the weekend. It ruined acres of crops, dropping hailstones the size of turkey eggs across the countryside. After the storm died down, neighbors found Mrs. J. W. Yopp, seventy-seven, sprawled in the chicken yard. The justice of the peace said she’d likely been beaten to death by the hail, on account of the dead chickens surrounding her body. Plennie hoped his folks were okay, but he wouldn’t know until he caught up to his mail down the line.