The next morning, as Plennie was starting north again, Al Capone stood in a Chicago courtroom flanked by six policemen. The curious filled every seat and packed the corridors and elevators. Young women stood on their tiptoes, trying to catch a glimpse of the most wanted gangster in America. When proceedings began, they all fell quiet. The assistant district attorney turned to face Capone.
“Did you violate the United States income tax laws in 1924?”
“Yes,” Capone said. “I’m guilty.”
The lawyer ran through the same question for each of the following years, through 1929.
“Guilty,” the gangster said.
“Did you and sundry others conspire to violate certain sections of the national prohibition laws?”
Capone wet his lips.
“Yes, I’m guilty.”
When it was over, still flanked by police, Capone turned and left the federal building, free on $50,000 bond. His sentencing was scheduled for two weeks later, around the same time a backward-walking man would arrive in the Windy City carrying a binder containing a newspaper clipping from Bloomington that expressed in practical terms the physical toll of his odd effort to make a legal living.
The Pantagraph, June 16, 1931
Walking in Reverse Around Globe, Wingo Finds It Health Aid
There’s more than one way of reducing a “baywindow” waistline according to Plennie L. Wingo, Abilene, Tex., who arrived in Bloomington Monday evening walking backwards on his way around the world. Two months ago Mr. Wingo left a restaurant in Abilene where he worked, weighing 166 pounds. His weight now is 136 pounds, the “baywindow” is gone, and he says he is physically better.
Leaving St. Louis eight days ago Mr. Wingo made fast time coming to Bloomington, averaging 20 to 30 miles a day. Monday he traveled 24 miles in eight hours and 25 minutes. Mr. Wingo sends all his luggage ahead by bus from stop to stop and carries nothing except a fancy hand carved cane with a steer horn handle. He left the city at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, north bound.
Mr. Wingo utilizes a pair of special glasses with mirrors to see “ahead of his back.” He wears civilian clothes, is well groomed and has gained a heavy coat of sun tan during the first leg of his trip. He expects to complete his walk in three years. He is paying his own way.
* * *
The citizens of Joliet, Illinois, cast cold, hard eyes on the stranger from Abilene, Texas. Plennie had never experienced such a chilly reception. It hadn’t been like this to the south, where he spent the night in a friendly couple’s home and chatted up a man mowing the shoulder of the highway. Here, everyone in town seemed suspicious and difficult. When he stopped to have coffee at a roadside greasy spoon, two plainclothes detectives soon joined him and started asking all sorts of questions. When Plennie explained, they asked him to prove his identity. When he showed his credentials and the newspaper clippings, the detectives apologized for troubling him.
All of it was odd.
He learned why when Route 66 turned north toward Chicago and he saw the hulking gray hull of the Illinois State Penitentiary growing in his mirrors. The pen held eighteen hundred bank robbers and bankers, as well as maniac rapists and calculated killers like Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, the University of Chicago students who tried to commit the perfect crime by driving a chisel into the skull of poor Bobby Franks, fourteen. Just four months before Plennie’s arrival, a five-man kitchen detail tried to make a break using a makeshift ladder and steel cable. They were caught in the searchlights and mowed down by machine-gun fire as soon as they hit the ground. Guards had been tipped off and were lying in wait. Some called it the Washington’s Birthday Massacre. The prisoners still inside, who heard the fusillade and knew its meaning, screamed and hollered until the sun came up. A month later, following the March death of a prisoner in solitary confinement, eleven hundred inmates rioted, destroying the mess hall, setting fire to buildings and stealing kitchen knives and meat cleavers before one man was killed and three others wounded by guards with guns and tear gas. The treatment of inmates in the congested prison was now the subject of legislative investigation.
Plennie would’ve walked around the prison, but the highway ran right through the middle, between the high-walled canyons of convicts. He noticed the guards with guns manning the towers, watching him as he walked. A sign affixed to the stone wall read: KEEP GOING—DO NOT STOP BETWEEN PRISON WALLS. He followed instructions and was glad to be past the place and on out of town.
He followed his hunger to the first café he saw in the next town north. He backed in, spotted a seat at the far end of the counter, and backed his way to it. When he sat down, the other diners applauded him, the proprietor smiling and clapping along. “You don’t need a menu,” the man said. “Anyone that did what you just did is welcome to the best meal in the house.” Plennie ate a T-bone steak that day.
He pushed on toward Chicago, introducing himself to strangers when the opportunity arose. He soon noticed an uptick in traffic, likely heralding the weekend. He watched a man with his family pass by, but the man continued to stare, watching Plennie over his right shoulder as he accidentally steered into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a southbound car. The crash sounded worse than it looked, and so far as Plennie could see there were no injuries. He wanted no part of whatever might happen next, so he ducked behind a hedge bordering the yard of a suburban home and waited, hoping they didn’t call the police. He’d been warned not to walk on Illinois highways, but he’d come a long way without incident, and he was so damn close to Chicago. He was glad when the motorists quit looking in his direction, returned to their vehicles, and drove away.
He popped into Joe Nejedly’s barbecue stand at 111th Street and Archer Avenue in Lemont, Illinois, and the waitress brought his entire meal out at once. He felt folks watching him, so he gave them a little treat. He ate the dessert first, then the vegetable, then the barbecue sandwich, then the salad, then the soup, then drank his entire iced tea. As he wiped his mouth, curiosity got the best of one of the men in the joint.
“We were watching you eat,” the man said sheepishly. “Is that the way you always eat?”
Plennie couldn’t muster a witty retort on the spot.
“No.” He smiled. “I just happened to be craving something sweet.”
He arrived at his aunt Marie Oldham’s house at 4753 Lake Park Avenue in Chicago that Sunday, June 21, having walked backward almost exactly 950 miles from Fort Worth in sixty-seven days. He was due for a rest, but his aunt Marie phoned a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, who hustled over, chatted awhile, then convinced Plennie to put his shoes back on. Yes, Wiley Post and Harold Gatty were taking to the skies to fly around the world faster than anyone in history, and Al Capone was scheduled to be sentenced to prison a few days later, and it had just been announced that the US government was ending the fiscal year with the first deficit since 1919. But the world wanted to see Plennie Wingo do his thing.
They were going to make a moving picture.
14.
An Ounce of Attention
On June 25 Plennie and his aunt Marie settled into their cushioned seats in the little movie house and waited for the film to start.
He still needed a booster, and maybe this was his ticket to fame, or even a little dough he could send back home just to let Della know he was actually working. Her letters had begun to concern him. If he could answer the next one with a chunk of money, enough to help her get by for a few months and convince her he was doing his best in a bad situation, perhaps his dear wife would cut him some slack. So far he’d sent nothing but words on paper. He reckoned there was some cash in the envelope Pete Mazza handed him in St. Louis, but he felt like he’d made a promise not to open it unless things got really bad. Besides, he still had to get to Europe and through Asia and across the Pacific and home—another twenty-four thousand miles or so. He needed money.
Their anticipation grew as the theater fell dark and the hubbub died down, and then the screen flickered to lif
e. The first Universal Newsreel clip featured Otto Hillig and Holger Hoiriis, in jittery black-and-white, embarking on a daring flight to Denmark from the quaint Catskills town of Liberty, New York, in a 300-horsepower Bellanca monoplane. Then they watched footage of the opening of a new traffic artery into New York to help alleviate bridge jams, and a wild wine-barrel-rolling race in Vincennes, France, and a Tacoma, Washington, man named Jack Rousseau building an eight-foot-tall house of cards using 135 decks. Impressive.
Then the next clip started, three minutes into the newsreel.
Texan on round-the-world walking tour! the opening slide read. Plennie Wingo of Abilene is different ~ he does it in reverse.
The streets were packed with pedestrians, dozens of them, women wearing long-sleeved dresses and cloche hats and men in suits and ties and skimmers. They carried newspapers and purses and shopping bags, and they each looked to be headed somewhere important. The camera captured shots from various angles to show little Plennie Wingo in all his unlikely glory. Wearing the same suit and tie he wore when he left Texas, Plennie crossed streetcar tracks like a professional, dodged two halting automobiles, weaved through a cluster of urban pedestrians streaming off a curb at Madison Street, and navigated up a wide set of stairs. Near the end, the camera focused on his face, his mirrored glasses, fedora, and broad smile.
No one seemed to notice or care that walking among them, dodging cars at busy Chicago intersections and weaving his way through oncoming throngs, was a man turned the wrong way. No one besides a Chicago police officer, that is, and he appeared to offer some firm instruction to the backward walker. The striking thing was that nothing was all that striking. If there were gawkers, the cameraman missed them. One man walking behind Plennie turned to the buddies flanking him in a get-a-load-of-this-guy sort of way, but that was the extent of the wonderment captured. Perhaps the ballyhoo bubble had popped, or the ulterior motives had become a little too obvious and commonplace. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, that the new generation had grown up to find all Gods dead and all faith in man shaken. Maybe Charles Lindbergh had spoiled it for more mundane madcaps. But the Chicago Daily Tribune was giving large play to Post and Gatty, who were trying to circle the globe in record time, stopping for fuel in England, Germany, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Cleveland. Banner headlines captured their every move. The only competition for space on the front pages seemed to be from Al Capone. Maybe he was what people wanted to see.
Capone was Chicago and Chicago was very much Capone. The Neapolitan transplant from New York’s Five Points gang had risen from “second-hand furniture dealer” to American potentate with seven hundred men at his disposal in a matter of years. The first time Capone’s photograph ran in the Chicago Daily Tribune was May 1924, when he emptied a six-shooter into the skull of a thug named Joe Howard in a barroom. Three people saw him. Two got amnesia, one went missing, and Capone never saw a courtroom. His rise as the symbol of subversion was meteoric. By 1931, he controlled the mayor’s office, a handful of judges, and the lion’s share of liquor sales to Chicago’s ten thousand speakeasies, and he ran the East Coast supply network between Florida and Canada. He tipped waiters $100 and hatcheck girls $25 and opened a soup kitchen for the down-and-out. He was pursued by the media en masse. In the first six months of that year, just nineteen editions of the Chicago Daily Tribune failed to include a story about Capone, which means that regular readers of the largest daily newspaper in the second-largest city in the United States read something about Public Enemy No. 1 on 162 of 181 days before his scheduled sentencing on June 30, 1931. And the average daily net paid circulation of the newspaper climbed from 795,000 to 820,000 in the same six-month period.
Plennie had read the headlines himself. Editors with business interests in the city’s reputation wrung their hands every time “typewriters” rattled in the streets or a bomb went off in town, and no fewer than 157 were found or exploded between October 1927 and January 1929. In that wild decade, there were more than five hundred gang murders, and few, if any, convictions. Capone held the city in his hands. He had the best seats at the theater and at baseball and football games, and he rode the streets in an armored car. He gave orders to politicians from the Lexington Hotel on Michigan Avenue and held press conferences where he played the part of an innocent businessman servicing a needy world, and so what if he had found ways to circumvent an unjust law? Hadn’t we been doing that here since the Molasses Act of 1733?
People pored over the stories about the entrepreneurs of the underground industry, the rose floats following gangsters to their graves, and the king of crooks and killers in the hot seat now, trying to avoid hard time at Leavenworth for not giving the federal government its cut of the millions he’d made in illegal trade.
Could a man walking backward capture an ounce of attention?
Plennie felt good about his odds. In fact, he was downright pleased at the good fortune of making it into the newspapers and onto the movie screen. As he left the theater, he felt sure he’d get a sponsor. Three and a half million people lived in Chicago, the second-largest city in America, the biggest he’d ever seen. It was 13 times larger than Dallas, 21 times bigger than Fort Worth, 150 times the size of Abilene. There had to be some man of business in a city this size who would want the kind of good publicity that Plennie could offer. The newsreel would be shown in theaters across America. Imagine how many eyeballs would land on a sign on Plennie’s chest advertising Johnston & Murphy Shoe Co. or Stacy Adams Shoes or even Goodyear Rubber.
He gave it the college try. Plenty of companies were willing to grant him an audience, but he couldn’t convince any to give him money. He visited the Bird-Sykes Company on Automobile Row and Van Camp Products Company on East Illinois, and even R. K. Mulholand, who was selling Rupture Cure on West Sixty-Third.
After eight days in Chicago with no luck, after Hillig and Hoiriis landed in Copenhagen before a crowd of thousands, after Post and Gatty made it around the world and back to New York, after Al Capone had delayed his ordeal by withdrawing his guilty plea, Plennie packed his suitcase in his aunt Marie’s home on Lake Park and rode in her car to the Western Union. He checked his luggage for Fort Wayne, Indiana, said goodbye to his kinfolk, then started down Michigan Avenue.
Before him were the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower and 333 Michigan Avenue in all their glory. On his right as he backed south, down at the end of Randolph Street near the remnants of the SS Commodore, there had sprouted a village of more modest measure which locals were calling “Hooverville.” The shantytown had sprouted quickly the past winter, with a dozen or so shacks built from discarded Commodore scraps, and faintly defined streets named Prosperity Road, Easy Street, and Hard Times Avenue, all in the shadows of Michigan Avenue’s famed skyscrapers. The shantytown even had a mayor at one time, a blue-eyed Irishman named Mike Donovan. “Building operations may be at a standstill elsewhere,” Donovan told a reporter, “but down here everything is booming.” The police had recently sacked the place and chased the men back under the monumental Michigan Avenue Bridge. Plennie kept going, past the Art Institute of Chicago, and Al Capone’s room in the Lexington Hotel, and on out of town.
15.
Are You Crazy?
Sometimes bad things happen to men chasing fortune, and if you manipulate the chronology a little, slow the time line down here or speed it up there, the picture comes clear and stands as a lesson of sorts. So start here, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with Plennie Wingo framed in the window of his room on the fifth floor of the Randall Hotel, “the best $2 hotel in Indiana.” He was overlooking the railroad yard, where a circus train was resting on the tracks, waiting to open a show the following day. He had backed 150 miles from Chicago, east along Route 30, without incident. He had slept in Valparaiso, Hanna, and Hamlet, and had gotten a paragraph on page five in the Indianapolis News while at Warsaw, the standard fare, beneath a story about an electrician who fell into a well and expired before aid could reach him, and another about a young
mother suffering from “mental aberration,” who wrapped her newborn in a blanket, placed it in a shed, and went for a walk on the railroad tracks until a Big Four passenger train removed her.
Plennie saw below him a man expertly riding a white horse and he knew without hesitation the man’s identity, for they had met some four months before in Texas. The man was Tom Mix—many called him “king of the cowboys”—and truth be told, they had not technically met. Plennie had been near Mix once while he was advertising for the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show. He recognized Mix just the same. The man’s legend was swollen. He had ridden with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. He’d served as sheriff, US Marshal, and Texas Ranger. He was a hero of the Wild West.
Alas, most of what people knew about Mix had been invented by publicists. True, Mix had enlisted in the army, but he went AWOL when he married the first in a string of wives. He’d worked on a ranch before migrating into Wild West shows and then, starting in 1909, moving pictures. He’d appeared in 291 of them, at one point reportedly making more than $17,000 a week. He and his wives knew how to spend it, too. He’d defined the Western genre and was its biggest cowboy star, wearing a ten-gallon hat before they became comical. He introduced John Wayne to acting and befriended Wyatt Earp. When Hollywood gave out on him, he signed with a circus. Then he was charged with tax evasion. Then his marriage fell apart. Then the market crashed and he lost his Arizona ranch and the great majority of his fortune. This is the state in which Plennie saw him down on Harrison Street in Fort Wayne—a broken man on horseback. But it’s not the end of the story.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 13