The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  The two then began to bounce around the country, finding employment periodically in the hospitality business. They had more ups and downs than the average couple, but they were determined to make it. They took want ads in newspapers, declaring they were a husband-wife kitchen team, willing to travel. They took over a concession stand in California. They worked and lived as house parents at the Kappa Sigma fraternity at UCLA until 1959, when a young pledge choked on a piece of raw liver during a hazing ritual and the fraternity was shut down. They then ran the kitchen at a boys’ ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains near San Fernando, California. They helped open three casino restaurants in Las Vegas.

  Juanita and Plennie Wingo at the Nugget, a concession stand they operated in Southern California. Undated. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Through it all, for decades, Plennie searched for ways to profit off his exploits of 1931 and 1932. He often carried his old journal with the newspaper clippings and autographs to show those who had not seen it, and he routinely brought his adventure up in conversation, to such a degree that it became an annoyance, something to be endured by those who loved him.

  Plennie Wingo working on his manuscript at home in 1962. Around the World Backwards was published in 1966. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Much of the time Plennie dealt silently with the burden of having never completed a book. It has been said that there are but two kinds of plots in great literature: a man leaves home, and a man returns. He had done both, backward. But writing a readable manuscript proved a more formidable challenge than the backwalking. He would at times sit at a typewriter with his coffee nearby and hunt and peck until he tired. Juanita captured a photograph of him writing once, and he bears the dull look of an armadillo caught in headlights. “Blackie Wingo 1962,” she wrote in blue pen along the edge of the frame. “Write his Book 1962.”

  By 1966, he had finished a manuscript and somehow managed to get Around the World Backwards published by a house called Carlton Press in New York. The book was clothbound and more than two hundred pages, with photos and chapter titles such as “I Startle a Mule” and “I Walk Backward on a Skyscraper.” Those who loved him overlooked the mistakes. Few outside of his family bought copies, and there is no evidence he made any profit to speak of. What is known is that he was soon searching for another publisher.

  * * *

  Johnny Carson: “What gave you the idea to walk backwards around Europe?”

  Plennie Wingo: “Well…”

  Carson: “Or around any place?”

  Plennie: “At that time, my daughter was hosting a party for her classmates in high school, and we lived in a rather nice house. It used to be a banker’s home. And we had a big front room and a fireplace, and the kids was playing in the game room, so they came in to the, three or four boys came into the in the room where I was, the front room, and I was reading the paper, and they said…they got to talking about the hard times. It was hard times. One boy said, ‘I’d like to do some kind of a stunt. Maybe make a lot of, get a lot of publicity and make a lot of money.’ He said, ‘You know, everything’s been done.’ He says, ‘Lindbergh flew across the ocean and every flagpole was full of sitters.’”

  Carson: “Yeah. People won’t remember that. They used to sit on flagpoles for months.”

  Plennie: “Then he says, ‘There’s that fellow that pushed the peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose, and…’”

  Carson: “So there wasn’t much left?”

  Plennie: “They just said, ‘Well, everything’s been done, I guess.’ I laid my paper down and I said—I didn’t know I was going to say what I did—I said, ‘Well, boys, everything hasn’t been done.’ They challenged me to tell them what it was. I said, ‘Well, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anybody walk around the world backwards.’”

  Carson: “Those were simpler days.”

  * * *

  In June of 1932, a US cavalry division with naked sabers charged the twenty thousand war veterans and their families camped on the Anacostia flats, across the Potomac from Congress. Convinced the veterans demanding their bonus pay were communists, General Douglas MacArthur violated the president’s orders and sent troops into the encampment with tear gas. Two babies were killed and a seven-year-old boy was bayoneted through the leg while trying to save his pet rabbit. It was a vicious attack by the American military on American citizens.

  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were murdered in a police ambush in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, in May 1934. He was twenty-five, she was twenty-three. Some twenty thousand people showed up at her funeral. He was buried under a granite marker bearing a four-word epitaph he had selected: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

  After his conviction for tax fraud in 1931, Al Capone served eight years in prison and then all but retired, shunning the spotlight that had followed him for a decade. He was living in a mansion in Florida when he died from cardiac arrest in 1947.

  With two TIME magazine covers under his belt, Jimmy Walker resigned as mayor of New York in September 1932, as the walls of scandal were closing in. He lay low in Europe until criminal charges against him evaporated. Then he moved back to America and took over Majestic Records and died of a brain hemorrhage in 1946.

  Herbert Hoover lost the presidential election of 1932 in a landslide to New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and began to seek historical vindication, which, to a certain degree he would find, though his legacy would never recover from the Depression.

  Oklahoma governor Alfalfa Bill Murray, who for a brief moment held the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, retired in 1935 to a small farm with no electricity or running water. By then his mental and physical health were fading and he would never hold public office again. He hung around the capital during his son’s term as governor in the 1950s, trying to sell copies of his memoirs, but few people recognized the skinny, bent old man carrying a bag of books, as one historian noted. At the time of his death in 1956, he was a shambling, unkempt figure occupying a dingy room in Tishomingo, sharing a bathroom down a long hallway with the same poor Okies he had once tried to help.

  The Indians refused to vanish, despite attempts to brainwash tens of thousands of Indian children in boot-camp boarding schools in the first decades of the twentieth century, and despite the continuing theft of land they’d been promised. By the time Plennie finished his walk, some 90 million acres of the original 138 million acres protected for Indians by treaties was held in white hands. The pace of theft was such that in three generations the tribes would be landless. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 stopped the seizing of “surplus” land, and Indians eventually gained the right to sue the federal government for past wrongs. Though the wrongs would continue as corporations and the federal government violated their sacred grounds in efforts to squeeze money from the earth, Indians also got the right to build casinos on their land, and several of the Oklahoma towns through which Plennie walked were revived economically by slot machines and table games. Seventy-three years after Plennie crossed the toll bridge over the Red River, the Chickasaw Nation, which had been cheated in the War Between the States, would open the WinStar Casino, and it would quickly grow to become the largest in the country. It would take from white Oklahomans and Texans many millions of dollars.

  Not far away, at the site of the Muncey-Jamison massacre in Plano, Texas, the state erected a marker where the settlers had been “savagely slain” during the final Indian raid in the county. Now the property is a suburb that hosts a hot-air balloon festival and treetop zip lines, and the wooden piling marking the spot of the murder was used by a homeowner, unaware of its significance, in the building of a playhouse for his children.

  * * *

  Carson: “Let’s go walk. I want to see, I want to see that. Can you come over here, Plennie, and show us the walk you use? What happens when you are on a highway and people pass by? Don’t they ever stop and wonder what you are doing?”

  Plennie: “Oh, yes, they do. That’s where I’m supporting myself. People
stopping and see what I’m doing and buy a postcard.”

  Carson: “Oh, you sell them a little postcard to kind of sponsor the walk?”

  Plennie: “Yeah. Supporting myself by selling postcards.”

  Carson: “Oh, I’ll take one. How much are they? See, he got his first card already.”

  Plennie: “That’s a dollar.”

  Carson: “Okay, I’ll take one. I want to be the first sponsor of the trip, Plennie.”

  Plennie: “Well, thank you. And this here is the kind of pictures I sold when I was walking across the United States and Europe for twenty-five cents. But that was harder to dig up than a dollar is now.”

  * * *

  In March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt stood at the threshold of the greatest opportunity any new American peacetime president had faced. “He will be thought of as something of a miracle worker,” the New York Times prophetically editorialized on the morning of his inauguration. The first thing he did was turn left, then harder still.

  He employed in his first one hundred days in office a philosophy of try it and see if it works. On the heels of fearing fear itself, Roosevelt focused on conservation of national land, developing public power, putting people to work and paying them for it, and protecting the money they were able to save. And for the first time, the federal government got into the business of caring for the poor, elderly, and ill, laying the groundwork for Social Security, unemployment programs, and government health care. Beyond that, systems were put in place to regulate business, protect workers’ rights, and establish a minimum wage.

  The Depression seemed to validate the claims that scores of intellectuals had made over the years, that an unregulated economy built on greedy competition between egotistical men destroyed healthy society. But the arguments about freedom and regulation, individualism and concentration would persist.

  In any event, by December 1933, Americans could raise a glass to the hope for their new future because Prohibition was dead and they were free to enjoy a cocktail again.

  * * *

  Carson: “If you’ve just joined us, the gentleman sitting to my right is Plennie Wingo and he’s going to do something you won’t believe. We had a gentleman last week who did weird things. He balanced things on his nose, and you are going to walk from San Francisco backwards to the Santa Monica Pier. When do you start?”

  Plennie: “Last day of this month. Ten o’clock in the morning.”

  Carson: “Do you wear any particular type of gear?”

  Plennie: “I’ll go just like I am dressed now.”

  Carson: “Suit and tie?”

  Plennie: “Yeah.”

  Carson: “You really dress up, don’t you?”

  Plennie: “Yes I do.”

  * * *

  Just after 6 a.m. on June 18, 1942, a German submarine fired torpedoes and hit a ship called the Seattle Spirit on the port side, flooding it and killing one officer. Fifty-one survivors—crewmen and passengers—were rescued. One sailor died of shock and exposure after jumping into the water. The Seattle Spirit sank at ten-thirty that evening.

  Adolf Hitler rose swiftly and in March of 1936, in violation of treaties, ordered German soldiers into Rhineland, the demilitarized buffer zone between Germany and France. Nobody lifted a finger. America had entered a period of pacifism and isolationism. As Hitler advanced abuses and aggression, much of America sat still. Macho Ernest Hemingway thought we should stay home. The poet E. E. Cummings wrote that “death’s clever enormous voice” hides in “a fragility of poppies.” Even Colonel Lindbergh emerged as an isolationist star. After lying low in Europe for a few years to escape the intrusive press and to deal with the grief and trauma of his son’s death, Lindbergh emerged in support of the Nazis as a bulwark against communism. He even accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle at a government dinner in Berlin and criticized Jews in the press and government, blaming them if war came.

  Of course, war came. Roosevelt rejected Lindbergh’s attempt to join the army after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “If I die tomorrow,” the president told his advisor, “remember Lindbergh is a Nazi.” The rejection stayed with Lindbergh, but when he died in Hawaii in 1974, President Gerald Ford overlooked his sins and said the courage of his Atlantic flight would never be forgotten and he would be remembered as one of America’s all-time great heroes.

  Adolf Hitler brought no small amount of ruination to his homeland. The cities Plennie visited in 1931 were obliterated. The war’s first firestorm came to Hamburg on June 24, 1943, and her people were turned to ash. American and British planes dropped 8,344 tons of explosives on 580 factories, and 50,000 people were killed. Beautiful Dresden got 2,660 tons and lost between 40,000 and 50,000 people. Hitler was buried around April of 1945 in the rubble of his ambition.

  * * *

  Carson: “What would you do if you were out there walking all the way from San Francisco, and some other guy came by you going the other way? You think that could be a possibility?”

  Plennie: “You mean walking backwards?”

  Carson: “Yeah. Now that you’ve announced you’re going to do this, you might have people walking up…”

  Plennie: “I might be meeting a lot of them.”

  * * *

  Plennie Wingo as depicted in the newspaper strip Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Plennie’s stunt was memorialized in the syndicated newspaper strip Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! His name was added to the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest backward walk at 8,000 miles. An assortment of backward records have been set since, including the largest backward walk (1,107 participants), longest distance cycling backward on a unicycle (68 miles), and fastest time to walk twenty meters with feet facing backward (19.59 seconds).

  In the mid-1980s, a Bemidji, Minnesota, man named Marvin Staples set out to claim the backward distance record. “This is supposed to be a free country and I’m just doing what I want to do,” he told a reporter, having logged 300 miles on a pedometer. “I got tired of people telling me, ‘You have to do things this way.’ I want to do it my way.” No evidence could be found to suggest he got close to the record distance. In May 2003, The Hindu, a reputable newspaper in India, chronicled the story of D. Muniyappan, a young man who was trying to break Plennie’s record. He walked 11,934 kilometers, or 7,415 miles, just shy of Plennie’s mark. But he, too, faded from the public record.

  Plennie’s record for distance remains.

  * * *

  Carson: “I tell you, you’re a remarkable man. Eighty-one years old. To even attempt something like this. But it keeps you young. Keeps you in good spirits.”

  Plennie: “That’s what I’m doing it for. Longevity.”

  * * *

  He was looking for a sponsor, still, forty-five years later. The Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in San Francisco had called a few months before to inquire as to whether Plennie had any relatives who might be capable of making a 400-mile backward walk across California to celebrate America’s 200th birthday, and to promote the museum to remarkable feats. Plennie offered himself up, but he never heard back, not until after he talked his way onto The Tonight Show, which paid him $372 for his appearance, the most money he had made in forty-five years of trying.

  He took the museum’s $500 and proudly pinned a Ripley’s button on his lapel and started backward. Juanita met him along the way with clean clothes and sandwiches. He sold postcards for a dollar. He spent the night with a preacher and his wife, the president of a soup company, and with a hippie in the back of a Volkswagen van, the symbolic Americana trifecta of religion, business, and resistance.

  Plennie Wingo walked 400 miles backward across California in 1976 and ended at Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum. (Courtesy of Pat Lefors Dawson)

  Several newspaper stories publicized his trek, and he arrived at the Santa Monica Pier to find that the museum had brought out a life-size wax version of the backward-walking champion. There, too, was Leena Deet
er Bare, who could write backward and upside down with both hands simultaneously, and George Dillman, who could break 1,200 pounds of ice with a karate chop, and Allen Lauer, who, when he was three, was the world’s youngest motorcycle rider. Vivian flew in from Texas, along with some other family members. They had a nice time. Plennie was proud again.

  Time slipped by. Della died in 1978. Vivian, too, a few months later, by her own hand, according to family.

  Plennie made money and lost money, and was regarded by friends as a lovable eccentric. He found a new publisher, Eakin Press of Austin, Texas, and launched his own tour when his book, essentially the same as the first with a different cover, was released in 1982. He put promotional stickers on his brown camper van and drove around Texas, visiting newspapers that had long been friendly to him. When a sister died in 1988, Plennie attended her services at the church. As soon as the funeral wrapped up, he set up a card table to sell his books.

  In his last public effort to monetize the walk, Plennie contacted a reporter for the Associated Press in August 1991. He was ninety-six years old, living in Wichita Falls, Texas, and his medical bills were mounting. He happened to be broke. He wanted to leave something behind to help Juanita, who had loved him and stuck with him for forty-five years.

  “I’ve been wondering how I could ever get any money out of walking backwards around the world,” he told the reporter.

  He said he expected to live just three or four more years. Not because he felt bad, but because he had recently come to face the brave and simple truth that death catches up to every man, even if he tries to rewind. He had reached his peak early, in the first act of life, and spent much of the rest of his time trying to capitalize on his climactic achievement, hoping to find the financial vein with a thousand needle pricks. What had been his crowning moment was but an annoying triviality to others, and now he could see nothing before him that he wished to accomplish and little behind that he wanted to recall. He could only hope that his last gasp of salesmanship would afford him a few more painless sunsets.