The Man Who Walked Backwards From Texas to Istanbul

At 9:03 on the morning of April 15, 1931, a Western Union clerk in Fort Worth stamped a letter of introduction for a broke cafe owner named Plennie Wingo. Wingo folded it away, turned his back on the road east, and started walking.

A Magazine Ad Solved the Hard Part

Wingo had run a cafe in Abilene until the Depression took it from him. He was waiting tables ten hours a day for twelve dollars a week when he heard some children complaining that every stunt worth doing had already been done.

Nobody, he told them, had ever walked around the world backwards.

The practical problem was seeing where he was going. He began by holding a mirror out at arm's length, which was hopeless on a highway.

Then he spotted an advertisement in the back of a magazine for sunglasses with small mirrors fixed to each side, sold to motorcyclists and sports car drivers. He sent off his money and practiced in them before dawn, so the neighbors would not see him and decide he had lost his mind.

Twenty-Five Cents a Postcard

In a Dallas studio he posed in the mirror glasses with a carved coffeewood cane, one foot behind the other, and ordered a thousand postcards at twenty dollars a thousand. He could only afford half of them up front.

The cards sold for 25 cents to anyone who stopped to ask what on earth he was doing. That was the whole business plan.

A Missouri paper caught up with him that summer. "Plennie L. Wingo, a man walking around the world backwards, stopped in St. James long enough to get some new toe taps for his shoes," it reported. "This was the 4th pair he had wore out."

He was covering about 20 miles a day, and living entirely on the postcards.

Dessert First in Lemont, Illinois

The walk turned him into a travelling show. In Lemont, Illinois he sat down and ate an entire meal in reverse for the onlookers, beginning with the dessert and finishing with the soup.

By the time he had backed through sixteen states and Washington, D.C., his legs had rebuilt themselves around the job: his musculature had reversed so far that his calves sat at the front of his shins.

In Pittsburgh a policeman gravely informed him that he was being ticketed for "mopery in the second degree," then laughed and let him go.

The Walk Ended in Turkey

Boston was as far as he could walk. A shoe company found him a working passage to Germany, and he picked the walk up again on the far side of the Atlantic, reversing through Central and Eastern Europe.

At the Turkish border he was arrested. The police, the Chicago Tribune reported, "couldn't decide whether he was coming or going."

When he was let out of the cell, the American consul talked him out of the rest of it. Wingo was becoming a nuisance and a hazard, and the country ahead of him was dangerous. Ben Montgomery's biography of him says he was told he had to leave for his own safety.

Istanbul was as far east as he got. The walk around the world was finished about a third of the way round.

The Long Way Home

A wealthy Italian paid for his passage back across the water, and Wingo still was not done. On August 13, 1932 he set off backwards out of Santa Monica, California.

He reversed into Fort Worth on October 24, 1932, two and a half months later, where his family was waiting for him.

Eighteen months of it had left him with four dollars.

What the Record Book Says

Guinness World Records still carries the entry today, under Longest journey walking backwards: Plennie L. Wingo, 12,875 km (8,000 miles), completed on October 24, 1932.

The entry squeezes the whole thing into one line running from Santa Monica to Istanbul. The documented trip ran the other way around: east out of Fort Worth in April 1931, and home through Santa Monica at the end of it. The record book's 8,000 miles also runs ahead of other accounts of the distance, which start at about 5,000.

He Did It Again at 81

Wingo wrote his own account, Around the World Backwards, and published it in 1966 with a small house that barely sold any copies. It was reissued in 1982.

In July 1976, at 81, he walked roughly 400 miles backwards across California and finished at the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in Santa Monica. He talked his way onto Johnny Carson's show on July 20 that year, which paid him $342.

Forty-five years after Fort Worth, he was still taking the long way around, facing the wrong way.