The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  Hoovervilles had popped up in cities across the country. Out-turned empty pockets became Hoover flags. Newspapers covering homeless men on park benches were Hoover blankets.

  Hoover was saddled with a sad situation, and he had too few fingers for the crumbling dike. He had tried to pit the government against the economic cycle, the first president to do so, by starting more public works projects than anyone had in the past two decades. He grew the government by creating civil service jobs; just recently more than ten thousand men and women had applied to be new Prohibition enforcers. He rammed constructive legislation through Congress while trying to limit the swell of bureaucracy and government debt. And often when he tried to distribute larger sums, Congress would slash the aid. Many Americans were still repulsed by the idea of living off the public dole and chastised those in need. In his boldest move, Hoover had proposed a yearlong debt payment holiday for European allies—Great Britain, France, and thirteen other countries—that owed money to the US, if they in turn would forgive German reparations for the same period. Germany was complaining that the burden of paying reparations to the victors of the world war was “unbearable,” and the country was on the brink of total economic failure. Hoover thought that by pausing debt payments for a solid year he could give the world economy a chance to recover.

  Ultimately, in spite of his efforts, Hoover was restrained by his own ideals. He believed that if the government was the source of relief, it would create dependency. Welfare would beget sloth. “This is not an issue as to whether people shall go hungry or cold in the United States,” he explained. “It is solely a question of the best method by which hunger and cold should be prevented.”

  Plennie thought about a little boy he’d seen on the outskirts of Hagerstown, Maryland, a few days earlier. The kid was wearing a harness on his chest, and a long rope was tied from the harness to a tree in the center of the yard, staking the boy in place. Upon seeing Plennie coming backward, the boy jumped to his feet and scrambled toward the house. He must’ve forgotten that he was tied down, and when the slack ran out of his rope it jerked him flat on his back. The boy’s mother ran outside screaming. She blamed Plennie. Plennie blamed the rope. The boy just cried. And that seemed like a fine analogy for this moment.

  There at the foot of the Washington Monument, he joked with the man beside him. Both he and the president were champions at going backward, he said, and the man admitted Plennie had a point. They chuckled. That was about all anyone knew to do.

  Back in June, when Plennie was less than a month into his trip, the Washington Evening Star ran a cartoon on its front page by the famed illustrator Clifford K. Berryman. It depicted a sign titled NEWS BULLETIN, and beneath that, MAN FROM TEXAS STARTS TO WALK AROUND THE WORLD BACKWARDS. In front of the sign stood a well-dressed elephant in a top hat labeled GOP and a tweed-suited jackass in a fedora labeled democrat. One was saying to the other: “THAT’S NOTHING NEW! WE’VE BOTH GOT LOTS OF CHAPS BEEN DOING THAT FOR YEARS.”

  On the day Plennie left the District, the Star ran another Berryman cartoon, this one depicting Miss Democracy leaning on her umbrella as Plennie Wingo backed toward the White House. “NOW MEBBE I COULD CATCH THE REPUBLICANS UNAWARES AND BACK A DEMOCRAT INTO THE WHITE HOUSE.”

  Clifford Berryman cartoon from the Washington Evening Star, author’s collection. (Courtesy of the Washington Evening Star)

  The same paper ran a story about Plennie under the headline TEXAN, WALKING BACKWARD, USES 5 MONTHS AND DAY TO GET HERE.

  At first glance, it looked like Plennie L. Wingo, the 36-year-old Texan, who is walking around the world, was on his way home to Fort Worth to meet himself coming back.

  “Hey,” shouted an interviewer, who caught Wingo on the wing today, en route between Washington and Bethesda, or rather Bethesda and Washington, “if you are walking back to Texas by way of that Atlantic you’d better turn around.”

  But Wingo, although his smoked glasses were turned full on the questioner, was looking in the other direction. And that, it developed, was the way he was walking.

  For Wingo, the globe-trotting pedestrian, was travelling in reverse. He was looking in reverse also, through periscopes in his glasses.

  What with so many motor cars on the highways these days, Wingo said, when his interviewer caught up and got behind him, it is better to look behind you if you’re going in that direction.

  Wingo made Bethesda last night, five months and one day after leaving Fort Worth. He came into Washington last night, face first, to look over the street layouts.

  After that Wingo returned for his official entry today. He expects to see the sights that lay behind him and then walk on for New York, as he will allow himself only three years to get back to Fort Worth backwards via the Atlantic and Pacific.

  “Maybe I am walking backwards,” said Wingo, “but I’m not behind my schedule.”

  The Washington Post, too, ran a feature story about the “persevering pedalist” on his “odd enterprise” to “girdle the globe.” If nothing else, Plennie gave reporters a chance to test their alliterative acumen.

  He faced the Washington Monument and started out of town, catching Highway 1 to Baltimore, then Highway 40 north. He did some fishing with a kind man in Perryville, Maryland, on the beautiful Susquehanna River, but caught only a crab. “Figures,” the man said. On September 28, he crossed into Delaware, his eleventh state, and was again hassled by a police officer. “What in the hell do you mean by walking backwards?” the officer said. “I don’t think anyone would try a thing like that unless he is crazy or a damn fool.”

  Maybe he was right.

  “I won’t stop you,” the cop said, “but if you get hit by a car the State of Delaware will not be responsible.”

  In Wilmington, the clerk at the Western Union refused to look at him or sign his book so he signed it himself: “3:17 p.m., September 29, 1931.” He checked into a boardinghouse and took a stroll around town, stopping to inspect the whipping post called “Red Hanna” in the town square. He asked a local about it. The man said Delaware still had a law on the books that allowed public flogging as punishment for crimes like robbery, adultery, and embezzlement, and they sometimes whipped folks passing through just for fun.

  On his way out of town the next morning, another police officer shouted at him.

  “Get out of town,” he said. “We don’t allow folks like you here.”

  “My pleasure,” Plennie said, starting backward, which must’ve seemed odd to the cop.

  “Why don’t you walk right?” he said.

  “As far as I’m concerned, I am walking right,” Plennie said. He didn’t stop until he crossed the state line.

  He rubbed his fingers along the crack in the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, sold postcards to the friendly policemen on the superhighway leaving town, got bit by bedbugs at a fifty-cent motel in Trenton, New Jersey, and mostly just spent his money, day after day. The largest and most expensive city lay ahead. He needed to catch a break. He needed something big.

  19.

  Bamboozled

  The police roped off the streets as the crowd began to gather, men and women heaving and shoving and squinting against the October sky, trying to get a glimpse of the strange fellow in the homespun suit up on the ledge, twelve stories above the hard concrete sidewalks of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

  The man on the ledge was glad they had come. Plennie had arrived with exactly eleven dollars in his pocket, and if he had any hopes of making it on to Europe, he needed to relieve the people below of their money.

  * * *

  He had left the dust storms in Texas and Oklahoma, backed past barren fields and stalled tractors in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, past shuttered factories and mines in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and hungry men and women along the way. The healthy wheat crop in Kansas was practically worthless, drawing the lowest prices in history, so bad that counties quit collecting taxes. A plague of grasshoppers was scourging Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. I
n the last week U.S. Steel had cut wages for 220,000 workers by 10 percent, then Bethlehem Steel and General Motors and U.S. Rubber Co. followed suit. But nowhere was the collapse as obvious as it was in New York. Everywhere he looked, the people seemed despondent, depressed. Bread lines stretched for blocks and apple vendors plugged sidewalks and men with nothing better to do smoked cigarettes on corners. Even the clothes people wore seemed to betray a collective poverty, ill-fitting and weak-seamed, women’s hemlines dropping like the stock market. The papers were filled with stories about more strikes and government debt and marchers banging at the doors of city halls.

  Much was made of the out-of-work silk weaver who drank poison in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church during the Sunday morning sermon, and of the stockbroker who ate mercury tablets, and of the dahlia grower who leaped on purpose from the wing of an airplane and landed in Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York, a convenient suicide, no mess. Capone was going to prison for eleven years. Alfalfa Bill Murray was going to run for president in ’32. Okies and Arkies and Texans were going west to find work and escape the increasingly frequent dust storms, which were growing tall as mountains. Here in New York, the Depression was stagnant, and no one seemed to have anything to do but stay put, stuck like day-old molasses on a kitchen table. It all felt like something was missing, the chirp of birds or the clang of hammers, but nobody could say exactly what.

  Plennie would’ve been in a terrible situation himself were it not for the charity of J. Walton Green, his chummy boyhood friend from school back in West Texas. Growing up, Walton had been a standoffish and unpopular boy, always in his books, studying while the others played. He had taken a correspondence course in hotel management while they were in high school and had landed a job as assistant manager at the luxurious St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-Fifth Street in New York and he was really making it, the rare eastbound migrant. Everyone at the hotel liked and respected him and, when Plennie called him up, Walton greeted his old friend with open arms. Plennie had no intention of sponging. In fact, he was too embarrassed to tell Walton how short on cash he was.

  “I know lots of people around town, and maybe I can help you,” Walton said graciously. “Anyway, come what may, I know you’re going to succeed in what you started out to do, no matter how discouraging it looks right now.”

  “Thanks, Walton,” Plennie said. “If you think you can help me with your connections, fine. But if you put out any money on me, I want you to keep books, and even if I have to wash dishes, I’ll pay it back.”

  Walton was having none of it. He insisted Plennie move in with him at the hotel, and the two soon commenced calling on shoe manufacturers across the city, looking for a sponsor. But as in St. Louis and Chicago, everyone was pinching pennies. They must’ve called every shoe shop in New York, with no luck. Walton suggested trying to contact shipping companies to see about getting Plennie a working passage to Europe on a big boat, but the Depression had hit the water, too. Massive ships were bobbing idle at the Hoboken port. The George Washington was the most recent victim, bringing the total tonnage of big liners resting at Hoboken to 144,000 tons. The biggest—the Leviathan, weighing nearly 60,000 tons—had laid off its crew of 856. Nearby bobbed the America, a 21,000-ton liner, and two others, Resolute and Reliance, 19,000 tons each. They weren’t scheduled to leave on cruises until late in the fall, if then. Thousands of out-of-work seamen waited on the docks, desperate for any job available. A man with no maritime experience or union card didn’t stand a chance.

  Plennie was finally able to get some publicity, thanks to an accountant he met who shared a telephone triangle with the Brooklyn Eagle. The paper ran a photograph of the “ODD STEPPER” who was “back-tracking after the fickle dame” of fame. “A young man with a Texas drawl walked backward into Brooklyn today and announced that he had been walking that way for months and would continue to do it for years,” the story read. “After all, he asked, isn’t the whole world going backward these days?” The story went on to say he was angling to get passage on a ship bound for London, and Plennie hoped the right person would see the story and throw him a hand.

  As the days slipped by without his landing a sponsor, Plennie thought more and more about giving up. He was tired of being a burden on his friend Walton, so he took a job and moved into a boardinghouse. He told his mother she “may call it an appartment.”

  I am going to work at a caffeteria until I get some kind of a proposition on my stunt. I am going to work nites and that will give me a chance to work on my stunt at day time. I got the job last Friday. I am doing bussboy work. I am getting two dollars a day and my meals. I can soon get on my feet at that for I can buy clothes awful cheap and my room cost three dollars a week.

  The financials were not ideal, but Plennie felt sure he could soon get a job behind the counter that paid three dollars a day. The manager liked him and said he expected an opening soon. Plennie was glad to have any job because they were hard to find.

  “I am going to work at getting my transportations to Europe and my passports every day until I get it then I will continue my trip,” he wrote. “Getting this job will give me a chance to do something toward my trip.”

  He’d made it to the East Coast backward, no small feat. But his prospects of continuing were dimmer by the day. And he had not heard a word from Della since that fateful letter in Pennsylvania. “I guess she is going to quit even writing to me,” he confided to his mother. “Well, all I can do is to make my trip some way and make a lot of money and that is what I am going to do if I possibly can. If I don’t make good I will never go around them again, but I am determined to make good and where there is a will I know there is a way.”

  If he did quit, it wasn’t like he had a job waiting for him back home. His dad and brothers were out of work, looking again for cotton jobs, the bottom of the employment barrel, work so hard it made men run, or pick up rifles and kill one another.

  What he was doing was crazy. He knew that. But he hadn’t predicted the practical difficulties of financing his stunt and keeping things together back home.

  That’s when he met Schwartz.

  * * *

  He was looking out over Times Square when a man sat down, struck up a conversation, and introduced himself as Alexander J. Schwartz. His business card said he was an auctioneer and appraiser who conducted sales throughout the United States, and it listed an office address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a half block from the Union County courthouse. He wore a fine suit and silk necktie and he struck Plennie as a man of means, a smooth talker, and an interesting fellow to boot. And maybe a little shady, but Plennie wasn’t the suspicious type. Plennie told Schwartz his story over a cup of coffee and betrayed to his new acquaintance his recent financial troubles.

  “I’ve tried about everything I can think of except maybe walking around the ledge of the Empire State Building,” Plennie said.

  Schwartz’s eyes lit up. He snapped his fingers.

  “That’s it!” he said. “We’ll get a permit. We’ll sell advertising at our own price!”

  Plennie was only kidding, but Schwartz was earnest in his excitement.

  “And if I slip,” Plennie said, “that will be the end of my trip right there.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Schwartz said. “I’ll take care of that, too.”

  He told Plennie he knew an engineer at the new Empire State Building who could get them to the top floor, and they’d figure out a way to fasten a safety wire around Plennie’s waist so the people on the street 102 stories below couldn’t see it. Plennie politely said he wasn’t interested in a scam to make money, but Schwartz wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  He dragged Plennie to meet his engineer friend. The building was simply incredible, shooting 1,250 feet into the sky above New York, and everything about it pointed to how grand the previous decade had been for mankind. The building stood because of a bet between two men with lots of money, such were the times. Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corp. and
John Raskob, a financier and advisor to General Motors, wagered to see who could erect the world’s tallest building. Chrysler finished his first, in 1930, a shining example of art deco architecture and the tallest building in the world…for a few months. It was then exceeded in height by Raskob’s 10-million-brick, 365,000-ton Empire State Building, which took just more than a year to complete. Herbert Hoover himself was on hand to dedicate it that May. It was as impressive in its compact, narrow rise toward the heavens as the clearing of the Plains was in its expansive breadth. Plennie had never seen anything like it.

  Schwartz’s friend, the engineer, laughed in their faces but played along and showed them to the express elevator, and they ascended quickly to the top, more than a thousand feet in the air. When they pushed open the door to the roof, Plennie could see what the man was laughing about. The wind gusts were so strong that none of them dared to step outside the cavity. There were 58,322 insane people in New York in 1931, and Plennie Wingo wasn’t about to add to the number.

  “Well, we tried,” Schwartz said.

  “What do you mean we tried?” Plennie said. “I’m the guy who was supposed to risk his neck on that stunt.”

  “You know what I mean,” Schwartz said. “It’s like a fighter’s manager telling the fighter, ‘We ain’t afraid of that guy.’”