The reality depressed him for a short while, until he hatched a new goal. He would make his way to New York, then to California, where he would begin his final leg of backward walking to Texas. He would finish in Fort Worth, claim his purse from the chamber of commerce, write his book, then live comfortably for the foreseeable future.
* * *
A. R. Ceretle was glad to see Plennie standing in the hotel lobby. He made his way through the crowd.
“Coming over to stay with me?” Ceretle asked.
Plennie did not cry, but he did tell his new friend what Charles Allen had said, and how he must now try to get onto a States-bound ship, even if he had little money. Ceretle comforted him. He bought their lunch, and their drinks, and paid for a taxi across town. Then he bought dinner, and more drinks, and a ticket to a picture show. Plennie tried to protest the charity.
“I can afford it,” Ceretle said. “You are my guest and you can spend your money when we are apart.”
“It is very kind of you to befriend me this way,” Plennie said, “when you have only known me a few days.”
“I have traveled a great deal,” Ceretle replied. “Most of the time I’ve been alone. I have seen just about everything. Now it is a pleasure to have companionship, fun to show somebody the sights who has not seen them before.”
Plennie had been suspicious. Ceretle’s generosity was unusual. In fact, Plennie had gone out of his way to ask several people at the US Embassy about Ceretle, including Mr. Allen. He asked whether they thought it was okay to befriend such a man. But now Plennie was warming up to his new friend.
“If that’s the way you feel,” Plennie told him, “I certainly am in a position to appreciate your hospitality.”
The two playboys palled around Istanbul on Ceretle’s dime as days turned into weeks. They went to a carnival, where they played games and watched a single man with instruments attached to every moving part of his body perform songs as though he were a ten-piece band. They slipped into shoe coverings and padded into the Fatih Mosque, built in the fifteenth century, and gawked over the patterns on the original rugs. They ate and drank all over the city.
Plennie had never seen a camel, so he felt lucky to sit near a wooden bridge in Istanbul and watch as caravans of camels loaded with herbs and rawhide and other commodities were inspected before passing over the strait. Their feet were most interesting to him. They looked as big as washtubs. He visited the docks, too, and watched as fishermen brought their catches to the market. Men carried fish upon padded wooden trays on their heads, shouting in strange tongues, passing fish to the highest bidders. He and Ceretle visited a professor—an acquaintance of Al’s—at Robert College of Istanbul. The man was surprised to meet Plennie, and laughed, and let them know he had read about the backward-walking Texan in his hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Still laughing, he phoned his wife. He wanted her to meet Plennie as well. The three of them drove to the professor’s home, where his wife was entertaining Queen Maria of Yugoslavia, who was the wife of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and daughter of King Ferdinand of Romania. Plennie joined them for tea.
Plennie left Ceretle alone one evening to go on a date with two Turkish girls he met at the consulate. Both spoke English and were in their twenties, single, and attractive, so when they invited him to an overnight picnic on the coast of the Black Sea with a group of young people, he obliged. He hated to leave Al alone but had a wonderful time with the friendly young women. They barbecued a whole pig on the beach and drank beer and wine as the sun fell, and Plennie wasn’t feeling so bad about Turkey or his predicament anymore.
One of the women was Priscilla Ring, a correspondent for the Associated Press, who had recently scored a rare interview with the Russian revolutionary and Soviet architect Leon Trotsky, who had been exiled by Joseph Stalin and was “camping out” on the Princes Islands in the Black Sea, surrounded by books and newspapers, writing a history of Russia and needling Stalin from afar. Plennie told Priscilla Ring that he didn’t read much but he was going to write his own book someday, about walking backward, and he might mention her in it.
One afternoon, while Plennie and Al were sauntering around the slums, they saw an old fellow picking through a trash barrel. When the man heard Plennie and Ceretle talking, he stood up straight.
“You are American?” the bum asked.
“He is,” Al said.
The man looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“I’m an American seaman,” he said. “I’ve been stranded here for years.”
His story was that he’d gone ashore one day, had a few drinks, and woken up without a ship, a passport, or money. Plennie could see himself in the man. His appearance, his smell, the desperation in his eyes. It scared him immensely. Al gave the seaman twenty liras and they kept walking.
* * *
The Turkish newspaper dropped the o from Wingo and called Plennie “Mr. Wing.” He was fine with that. He was also okay with the fact that the story made him sound like something of a jailbird. But he was saddened to read the very first reportage on what had been his climax, his turning point. “Now he says jail is not for him,” the story said, “and he had been advised to end his backward trip here by some American officials, because the Asia Minor country is so hazardous and Mr. Wing said he was tired of jails.”
He hoped primarily that the new bit of publicity would help him get home. He’d been stranded nearly a month, failing twice to get a job on board a Standard Oil tanker bound for New York. He visited Charles Allen, the consul, to see if he had any mail waiting. Allen caught Plennie by surprise.
“It is not natural for anybody to be so kind as Mr. Ceretle is being,” Allen pointed out. He suggested Plennie keep his eyes open. He let on his suspicion about Ceretle asking for some kind of favor down the line.
A few days later, Ceretle finished his business in Istanbul and began packing his things. His next stop was France. He told Plennie he was sad to be going. Plennie was sad, too. He imagined the seaman with the crusty beard bent over the trash can.
“If it wouldn’t hurt your feelings,” Ceretle said, “I would like to pay an extra fare when I sail for France, and you can go along. I feel sure you can get a boat from there.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Plennie said. “You have done so much already that I could never live long enough to repay you. As much as I would like that, I could not accept.”
Ceretle stopped him. “Just consider it settled and say no more,” Ceretle said. “I would do nothing but worry about you if I were to leave you behind.”
Ceretle’s love seemed too convenient.
While the vast majority of Plennie Wingo’s later account of his backward adventure squares with independent sources, this portion deviates in important ways from the various accounts by Mr. Allen and other State Department officials whose correspondence can be found in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, inside a box labeled SUSPECTED NARCOTICS TRAFFICKERS, 1927–1942, inside a file folder titled WINGO, PLENNIE L.
The accounts seem to agree that a man paid Plennie’s fare from Istanbul to Marseilles aboard the steamship Sphinx, and that Plennie raised a concern just before launch about suspicious cargo entrusted to him, and that American consul Charles E. Allen contacted French authorities with the information, and that Plennie spent a few days in Paris before setting off for New York on the steamship Exeter.
Here’s where they diverge.
In the book he’d write years later, Plennie spelled the man’s name Ceretle, though his journal contained the following name written in pencil in handwriting that does not appear to be Plennie’s: “A. R. Ceretti, Lista de Correo, Barcelona, Espain.” Nearby, in Plennie’s hand, is this: “Paid Boat fare from Constantinople to France.”
According to Plennie’s book, he reported his good fortune with “Ceretle” to Charles Allen three days before setting sail, and Allen “got really suspicious.” Plennie would write, “and in like degree, I got annoyed. For a man who had not cared
enough about my troubles to get me out of the stinking Turkish jail, he was taking an awful interest now.”
On sailing day, Plennie said goodbye to his new friends, retrieved his passport, boarded the Sphinx several hours early, then retired to one of the side-by-side cabins Al had purchased. When Al boarded a little while later, a porter was following with two large trunks on a dolly. “Mr. Wingo,” Al said, “we have the right to carry two trunks on your ticket. Since you have none and I have such a great amount of luggage, I am going to take advantage of this and save money I would have to pay on excess freight.” Plennie would later write in his book that though he said okay, he was increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement, especially when Al said: “If any of the ship’s crew ask, just tell them the trunks are your personal property, and it will save me paying extra duty.”
Plennie would write in his book that he wondered why the man who splurged on food and drinks was suddenly trying to save on extra baggage fees. He recalled that Al always conducted business in Turkish, and that his colleagues would often look at Plennie and chuckle. Plennie would write that “almost with no volition,” he rushed to the deck, down the gangplank, and found Mr. Allen conveniently standing on the dock, visiting with the captain. He would write that he pulled Allen to the side and told him about the trunks, and about the possibility that they contained contraband, to which Allen replied:
“You have just done it, my boy!” He pointed out if the trunks were filled with narcotics, and I had said nothing to him about them being put into my possession, I would have been in for no end of trouble. If the man was only trying to save on duty, time would tell. I was to behave normally. He would get in touch with the proper agents in France and clear me of any responsibility for the cargo.
According to Plennie’s account, he was then overwhelmed by guilt for possibly betraying his friend. It haunted him, kept him awake at night, as they ate and drank and visited ports in Greece, then Italy, then Barcelona, before arriving at France. In Plennie’s version, the two visited a museum in Athens, ate in Al’s favorite Naples restaurant, where he was known by everyone, met beautiful women at nightclubs in Italy and Greece, and met his family in Barcelona. “I struggled mightily to be natural and appeared to be enjoying the voyage,” Plennie would write. “The thought that I might be wrong, and my benefactor would discover that I had reported him hung heavy over my guilty head.”
Per Plennie’s book, the ship neared Marseilles after fourteen days, and Al mentioned that he never had trouble with customs because he knew the right ones to tip. When they docked, Plennie would write, Al instructed him to hold back, then follow later with the trunks.
Suddenly he frowned at me. “What makes you so nervous?”
I tried to look surprised that he should suppose me upset in any way. “Nothing that I know of,” I responded.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said solicitously. “Wait here in your cabin and I will send the porter with a dolly to pick up your trunks.”
I did not miss that reference to “your trunks.”
When they cleared customs without issue, they both climbed into a carriage while men loaded their trunks. Just then, two police officers approached the dray and asked, “Which one of you is Mr. Wingo?” Plennie signaled.
“Then you are Ceretle?”
He would write that Al jumped to the ground and tried to make a break for it before being grabbed. They were both marched into the customs house and placed in separate cells. About an hour later, Plennie was released to the American consulate. He asked the French officer about his friend. Was he being held?
“Yep, I’m afraid so.”
“Would you mind telling me why?”
“No, not a bit,” the official said. “He had enough stuff in those two trunks to set this whole town crazy. You did the best thing you ever did in your life when you notified Mr. Allen before you sailed.”
It seems likely, however, that Plennie’s version is less than truthful, because the State Department documents do not mention an Al Ceretle, or Ceretti, or anyone besides Plennie Wingo.
Charles E. Allen, American consul at Istanbul, wrote of his suspicions to the secretary of state in Washington, saying Wingo approached him just before departing Istanbul with intense concern that he’d been suckered into being a drug mule. Allen wrote that Wingo realized the improbability of meeting a high-class businessman in the cheap hostel in which he’d been staying, and was suspicious when the businessman asked him to carry trunks of samples aboard the ship. “Mr. Wingo was therefore convinced that the trunks could not reasonably be expected to contain legitimate commercial samples and he was obviously very much worried lest they be opened and found to contain contraband.”
What puzzled Charles Allen was that Plennie was completely calm and collected when he arrived at Marseilles, as if nothing had happened. His demeanor at arrival, Allen wrote, “would seem to indicate that something had transpired in the meantime to calm his fears, for example, the unloading at Piraeus or Naples of the original contents of the trunks and the substitution of other contents.” Allen suggested that an investigator should interview Plennie with that in mind.
“It would be particularly interesting to know whether he was in funds upon arrival at Marseilles, a point having a bearing on his apparent change of attitude seeing that he left Istanbul totally penniless,” Allen wrote. “It would be most particularly interesting, from the point of view of this office’s investigations, to know the name of Mr. Wingo’s traveling companion, the owner of the three trunks in question, since, knowing this name, it might be possible to discover locally something regarding the activities of the individual bearing it.”
An investigator followed up on Allen’s suggestion and wrote that Plennie “appeared to be without any resources whatever; and about an hour afterwards he was in the American consulate asking for some monetary assistance, or, if they could find him a ship on which he could work his passage home to the United States.” The investigator said the consulate gave him no pecuniary assistance, but did get him on the steamship Exeter as a worker. During his three-day stay in France, the investigator wrote, Wingo stayed at Hotel Trieste, “a dirty sort of hostelry, where people may sleep for a few francs a night. Official enquiry there reveals that Wingo, who seemed to be living on charity, had no friends or visitors during his stay.” The investigator also tried to trace “Wingo’s travelling companion, the owner of the trunks, through the ship’s manifest,” and found only three suspicious names of guests in first-class cabins: Strugo, Turkish; Rumann, Polish; and Szmidt, Turkish. At a minimum, there had been no arrest on the docks, and no official sign of Al anywhere.
Contrary to the investigator’s report, Plennie would write in his book that upon arrival in France he took a room in the YMCA near the consulate, and, “I took to enjoying myself, eating at outdoor cafés. Nobody knew who I was, and I had no spirit to announce it.” And he would suggest that he had the money to afford a good room and good food for a solid week in France before catching a free ride home on the passenger ship Exeter.
“It was due to poor Al,” Plennie would write, almost like a wink, “that I had the money.”
27.
Lone Star
Early in 1932, a black cloud ten thousand feet from ground to ceiling appeared outside Amarillo, Texas, a moving mountain, and people in it said it felt like a blizzard with an edge of sandpaper. A month later, the economy found its bottom after shrinking 27 percent from its peak in 1929. In the spring, Adolf Hitler embarked on a postelection flying tour, and the masses stood waiting for seven hours in Donauwörth in southern Bavaria for the Führer. “What now?” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Something has to happen. We have to gain power. Otherwise we will triumph ourselves to death.” A month later, a delivery truck driver pulled off the road in rural New Jersey to relieve himself in a grove of trees and found Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s baby. A week later, a group of unemployed veterans from Portland, Oregon, riding the rails to
Washington, were rounded up by the National Guard in St. Louis and shipped out of state on trucks. The incident received attention in the press, and thousands of other veterans joined the march on Washington of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Their encampment in Washington would swell to eleven thousand by the end of the following month. Two weeks later, President Hoover signed into law the largest peacetime tax increase in history, expecting it to raise $1 billion. Two weeks after that, Henry Ford was published in Literary Digest, writing, “I do not believe in routine charity. I think it is a shameful thing that any man should have to stoop to take it, or give it.” Two weeks later, having passed the Statue of Liberty on the Exeter, having hitchhiked into Middle America, Plennie Wingo dropped a hastily written letter, replete with misspellings, in the mail to his kin in Abilene.
Canton, Ohio
June 25, 1932
Dear Mother and all,
I am sure you will all be supprised to know I am in the good old U.S.A. again.
I arrived in New York City June 15. I sure have had a wonderful trip since I left Constantinople. The Itallion friend took me with him to Marceille, France. We sailed on a large French steemer. It was the Sphinx, one of the greatest pleasures I have ever had. There was nothing to good for me by my friend. I will never forget him.
I took a passenger boat of the American export lines from Marceille to N.Y. I hitchhiked to Canton…I met a good fellow in New Haven, Conn., he was a chef cook on a large diner when I met him and I was just 36 miles from Canton and this fellow come along in a new sport roadster Ford and I flagged him and he recognized me and stopped.
He is on his way to California. He is going to stop a few days in Chicago and then on the Cal, so I will get to visit with Aunt Marie again. I am going on with him to Cal, so I can finish my trip from there to Fort Worth.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 22