On August 28, as he backed his way out of the city, a Pittsburgh police officer shouted at Plennie to stop where he was. The cop was tall and broad-shouldered, with close-cropped hair, thick eyebrows, and large ears. Seemed to be in his midfifties. He looked Plennie over, then pulled his citation book out of his pocket.
“I hate to do this,” he said, “but it’s the law.”
Yet again. Plennie tried to summon the nerve to protest.
“What’s the ticket for?” he asked.
“Mopery in the second degree,” the cop said without looking up. The way in which the words came out of the lawman’s mouth, so clear and direct, frightened Plennie.
“Mopery?” he said. “I never heard of that. What is it? Is it serious? What did I do?”
“You’ll find out how serious it is at the trial,” the officer replied.
“Trial?”
“Yeah,” the officer said. “You got a good lawyer?”
Plennie was starting to come undone. Thoughts of courtrooms and fines he could not pay rushed into his head.
“I don’t have any lawyer,” he said.
“Well, buddy,” the cop said, “better get one, because you’re going to need one.”
Sometimes men in such situations consider running, the old fight-or-flight dichotomy.
“But Officer,” Plennie said, “I don’t understand. Is it because I’m walking backwards?”
“That’s only the beginning of it,” the cop said.
Plennie was flummoxed. This was it. The end of the line, a month short of Manhattan. All for mopery.
“Maybe you can get off with a couple years up the river,” the cop said, tearing off the ticket and forcing it into Plennie’s hands.
Plennie looked at his citation.
“GOOD LUCK ON YOUR TRIP AROUND THE WORLD.”
Now the cop was laughing. Now he was doubled over. Now Plennie smiled and shook his head and started laughing too.
“I just couldn’t resist the opportunity,” the officer said, trying to catch his breath. “I had been reading about you and when I saw you I thought I’d have a little fun.”
Harry Hart was a good cop. He’d worked as a firefighter for eleven years before joining the police department in 1913. He was one of the city’s first traffic cornermen before advancing to lieutenant in the East End district, and he would go on to lead a colorful career as a homicide detective, solving murders and working hard right up until the day they rushed him from the station to the hospital where he died.
“I’ll never forget you,” Plennie said. “That’s for sure.”
* * *
A columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a story about Plennie the day he backed out of town, calling him a “pleasant chap” who “decided to cut loose for a little vacation.” Even if that wasn’t totally true, it might have been a fair interpretation. The column explained that he wore mirrored glasses to prevent “running into telegraph poles and autos.” It mentioned how odd it was for Plennie to walk normal after checking in at Western Union, how “the act of turning around to walk the natural way was something like stepping out of a pair of overshoes—or recovering from a sleeping foot.” It mentioned the book he planned to write, and that he supported himself by selling postcards and advertising for businesses.
The column made its way into the hands of R. C. Williams, a special representative of the Sulphur Products Co. of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, makers of McKeon’s Liquid Sulphur, the natural conqueror of things like Rheumatism, Catarrh, Piles, Sore Throat, Hives, Prickly Heat, Eczema, Poison, Skin Diseases, Bites, Whites, Inflammation of the Womb, Ulceration, Chronic Enlargement, and all ovarian disorders. Liquid Sulphur did not have the “vacillating buoyance so often noticed in those addicted to the use of patent concoctions and alleged stimulants, but rather the slow but sure and persistent climbing upwards, always upwards, toward the pinnacle of absolute physical and organic perfection.”
Mostly it might make your sore feet feel healthier, and who better to advertise that than Plennie L. Wingo? Williams tracked Plennie down at his hotel and proposed the idea. Plennie agreed wholeheartedly and made himself immediately available. He’d run his savings short in Pittsburgh and couldn’t sell any postcards in coal country. Money was so tight he had begrudgingly opened the envelope from Pete Mazza and found twenty dollars, a significant sum, which meant sleeping indoors instead of on the highway.
“How would you consider walking around town tomorrow,” Williams said, “for let’s say four hours, with a placard advertising Liquid Sulphur for tired feet?”
“I’d be glad to,” Plennie said.
“Shall we say twenty-five dollars for the job?” Williams asked.
Plennie was so flabbergasted by the rate, the largest offer he’d ever received, that he didn’t answer immediately. Williams took this to mean he was hesitant.
“Naturally,” Williams interjected, “I’ll pay expenses at the hotel, and meals.”
“Okay,” Plennie replied, trying not to sound too eager. “I guess I can stay over an extra day for that.”
There would rarely come a day when the money in his pocket qualified as anything more than sustaining, but this recent good fortune had left him financially secure. With Pete Mazza’s gift and Williams’s payment for labor, he had enough to sleep in a two-dollar hotel room every night for more than three weeks. He could have, that very day, in that very vicinity, paid one month’s rent on a six-room brick house, bought thirty plain linen dresses in rose, blue, green, or pink, or walked off the used-car lot with a 1927 Ford Tudor Sedan, free and clear, and driven it back to Texas. Had he kept what he earned from Williams and sent Pete Mazza’s gift home to Della and Vivian in Abilene, where that very day the Texas governor was calling an emergency legislative session to save cotton farmers from complete disaster, his wife and daughter could have bought five pairs of leather high-heeled shoes, a new Simmons Slumberking Mattress, eight hundred loaves of bread, or eighty-six pounds of sliced bacon.
The next thing Plennie knew, he was “stuck”—his word—at a beautiful resort on a mountaintop outside a tourist town called Breezewood, Pennsylvania.
17.
Choices and Consequences
She had not complained, so far, in the strictest sense, in that she had not explicitly written to say that what he was doing was selfish, self-serving, egomaniacal, and unbelievably, unquestionably irresponsible. Della had not yet expressed the outrage a reasonable woman might have felt if her husband of sixteen years and the father of her teenage daughter had packed a suitcase and left home in the thick of one of the worst and most difficult years in the history of man.
So when Plennie stopped at the post office in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, and found that there was a letter from the wife from whom he had not heard in fifty days, he tore it open with no small amount of anxiety.
There in the letter she articulated her feelings. She wrote that she was sick of his silly project. She wrote that she was tired of clawing to survive, and that if there had been any chance his original scheme was going to work he would have sent money home by now. She wrote that she wanted him to knock it off and return home, immediately.
Vivian wrote her own letter, which was included, and it, too, was hurtful. She wrote that her mother had lost a significant amount of weight since he’d been gone and was in poor health.
Plennie would later recall that it “looked as though the entire trip would be a hand-to-mouth affair and she was tired of getting along without me and with no amount of money coming in,” and he would fail to acknowledge the reality of his recent financial windfall. “I was not prepared for what the letter said!” he would write.
That Sunday in Breezewood, September 6, he wrote to his own mother, opening with platitudes and then cutting to the chase.
Mother, I am going through with something now. I finally got a letter from Della and Vivian. Oh, mother. I did not intend to tell you yet, but I might as well. It was the saddest and heart-breakinges
t letter I have ever read in my life. Della and Vivian have both turned against me and ask for freedom.
Mother, what in the world will I do? I can’t eat or sleep. I never was so shocked in my life to think they had been writing encouraging letters all the time and all of a sudden I got this letter that I am telling you about. Mother, I am doing my best to hold up under this and am doing so by the help of God. God has answered my prayers. He has forgiven me of my sins and I am getting a relief by praying to God.
Mother, the poor girls don’t know what they are doing. I am praying for them and the letters they both wrote have broken my heart. Mother, by the help of God I am going to make good on this trip and I guess that is the way I will gain them back by finally doing good.
Oh, mother. I can’t give them up this way but they are determined to quit me so it looks like I am doomed to be left without them. I am worried about Della’s health. Vivian said she only weighed 90 lbs. I know she is in bad health some way. If I possibly can I am going to help them if they let me.
He took a break from writing and slept some. It is unknown whether he prayed, too, or dwelt on the significance of the fact that his wife was underweight by thirty pounds or more. He continued when he woke, appealing for sympathy and exaggerating his walking routine.
Mother, this is Monday morning. I was so tired I laid down and slept a little but not much. I have been doing my best to get in some money with this stunt so I could help them, but I guess the money part will come too late to do any good. I have walked every day, even when I didn’t feel like it, but would be compelled to keep going in order to sell enough cards for the next night’s lodging. But this is what I have got for that.
I know I have not made them a good living the past two years, but I have done my best. But mother, they are two sweet girls and are both real ladies and I love them, too. I can not say a thing against them and mother, I know that you love them too. If there is anything I can ever do to redeem myself and get their forgiveness and respect I will do it. Mother, pray for them that they may be happy in their undertaking and that I may be able to bear such burden even though it is heartbreaking. Well mother, I will close for today. Will write again later. You can answer this at Washington, D.C.
I will be there in a week or so.
May God bless and keep Della and Vivian for I love them and you, mother. I know my mother’s love.
From one who is sad and broken hearted,
Plennie
He tucked the letter inside an envelope addressed to Mrs. T. H. Wingo and affixed to its face a five-cent stamp. On the back he wrote a calculating postscript:
Mother don’t let Della know I ask you to write her a letter and put this letter in with it. That will let her know that I was not talking against her, won’t it. Will you please do that?
Love to all—Plennie.
He picked up his trail outside the resort on the top of Sideling Hill Mountain and started backward toward McConnellsburg, where he left the Lincoln Highway. He was eating that evening in the Harris Hotel when the proprietor, James J. Harris, joined him. They talked awhile and Plennie shared some stories. Harris sensed Plennie’s dour mood and interrupted.
“What’s bothering you?” Harris asked.
Plennie tried to convince the hotelier nothing was wrong, but Harris kept asking until Plennie let it all out, unable to control himself. He thought he’d overcome the pangs of depression. He had not.
“You decided right,” Harris said. “Don’t you ever go home when things are going as good as they are.”
18.
Persevering Pedalist
He stood at the base of the Washington Monument and looked out over the Mall, the delayed civic reflection of what America had been and aimed to become. Indigenous tribes had once hunted and gathered food along the Tiber Creek estuary on the east, but they were displaced by European settlers who used the flood-prone lowlands for grazing. When Washington was chosen for the capital, the land before Plennie was set aside for a grand avenue flanked by gardens and embassies. The brilliant Frenchman Pierre L’Enfant, who planned the Mall, lost support and was either forced to resign or fired, depending on the teller. He tried to get Congress to pay him and died penniless.
The first two public buildings housed the president and Congress and would have to be rebuilt after the British burned the city in 1814. Politics, lack of funding, and an anti-immigrant group nearly doomed the Washington Monument behind Plennie, which was not more than a stump for two decades before rising tall. The War Between the States gave lift to a smattering of new buildings and monuments here and there, and some cohesion, but it was still very much a strip of earth in flux, a place that would someday host museums to peoples not yet respected, and monuments to men not yet called great—to the man who would become the very next president, for instance, and to a black man who was then a two-year-old boy in Atlanta, Georgia. Hoover had just recently dedicated the District of Columbia memorial to the world war nearby. He used the opportunity to warn Americans that the world was more heavily armed than at any time before the world war, with international conflicts probably no fewer than they were before actual bloodshed in that war began.
Plennie had visited the US Capitol on the east end, where a statue of Jefferson Davis had been unveiled just three months before, and Davis’s name and likeness would carry controversy into the next century. To the west, Plennie gazed upon the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated nine years before, the work described by James Truslow Adams as “perhaps the finest example of sculpture in the last half century.”
Wasn’t it interesting the men we chose to remember, and what we remembered? The first president, both a slaveholder and a war hero. The sixteenth, who jailed editors and suspended habeas corpus, and then ended slavery. It seemed to be more about timing than anything, or maybe it had to do with corners on which the light of history had shined.
The long, linear, open expanse that stretched before Plennie was for the people, a void upon which to rest and relax, to protest, to be seen and heard. They’d come already, unemployed workers called Fry’s Army, then Coxey’s Army, when things got bad in the 1890s. Thousands of women came in 1913 to demand suffrage and enfranchisement, and they got it, though things in Washington move slowly. Thousands of members of the Ku Klux Klan poured onto the Mall in 1925, their dusty autos bearing stickers professing the legend 100 PER CENT AMERICAN. They burned a big cross in Virginia, then went home. Also American was the editor of the Buffalo American, who wrote about the Klan that “50,000 men are a mere drop in the bucket of 115,000,000 and the rest of the nations have chuckled with glee at this attempt to purify the sins of 300 years with such attempts as these.”
Gathering energy on their move toward Washington even now were the Hunger Marchers, some of whom Plennie had passed in Springfield, Illinois. Their numbers were growing. They’d been arrested in Oklahoma City, teargassed in St. Louis, clubbed in Indianapolis, provided with hay for beds in Columbus, Ohio, fed warm meat and potatoes in Owosso, Michigan, and labeled communists everywhere they went. The sentiment—that the marchers were all communists—has lost the edge that it might’ve had in the early 1920s, during the Big Red Bolshevist Scare, when books and movies were scrutinized, radical college professors were fired, and high school teachers were made to sign oaths against communism. “You cannot have from five to eight million people wanting work and unable to get it without knowing that this constitutes a challenge to our social order,” Maryland governor Albert Ritchie told the annual conference of governors, “and that it is the strongest argument for communism unless it is solved.”
Whatever they were, they were coming. Washington civic and trade organizations resolved to extend no free hospitality in the way of shelter or food to the marchers, and the police were forming a “welcoming committee” to deal with them. They would fail to break the White House or Capitol, despite demands to be heard. And right behind the Hunger Marchers were the marching farmers, and right behind them came Father James Renshaw
Cox, a Roman Catholic priest from Pittsburgh, and twenty-five thousand unemployed Pennsylvanians called Cox’s Army, and right behind them came the Bonus Army, twenty thousand veterans of the Great War demanding their bonus pay immediately. These were to be long months in the capital.
The man standing beside Plennie asked why he hadn’t gotten President Hoover’s autograph.
“He wouldn’t care to give it to me,” Plennie said. “He’s the head man in this depression and the cause of my starting out on this jaunt.”
The maligning was mild, and only partly true. But it was Hoover, it must be said, who had warned President Coolidge that his bull market was madly out of control.
If ever there was a man made for the challenge of a moment like this, he might’ve had Hoover’s pedigree. An orphan by the age of ten, Hoover had hustled his way through Stanford University and roamed the world as a geological engineer. By twenty-four, he was running a gold mine in Australia, and by twenty-seven, he managed a coal mining operation in China and was hailed as the highest-salaried man of his age in the world, earning $30,000 a year. As the unpaid head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1915, the great Quaker humanitarian fed seven million starving Belgians and French, then directed food to Russians in the same shape. He was touted as a brilliant progressive technocrat at the Commerce Department and was one of the key Americans in rebuilding Europe after the war. Just before the market crashed, he’d received a standing ovation at the last game of the World Series in Philadelphia.
Now, though, his name was synonymous with hard times, even if they weren’t entirely of his creation. As H. L. Mencken wrote: “there was a volcano boiling under (Coolidge), but he did not know and was not singed. When it burst forth at last, it was Hoover who got its blast and was fried, boiled, roasted and fricasseed.” Hoover would attend another World Series baseball game the month after Plennie passed through DC, and he’d be booed unmercifully, an unprecedented public embarrassment for a sitting president. Already, men were lining up to take his job, including the wiry governor of Oklahoma, Alfalfa Bill Murray, the same man who’d sent his National Guard to fight Texas at the Red River. He had not occupied the governor’s office in the Sooner State for a solid year yet but was already considering a run to replace Hoover. He would throw his hat in shortly, and his campaign platform for the highest office in the land would promise people the “Four B’s: Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans.”
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 15