The Man Who Walked Backward by Ben Montgomery

Author:Ben Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

14.

An Ounce of Attention

On June 25 Plennie and his aunt Marie settled into their cushioned seats in the little movie house and waited for the film to start.

He still needed a booster, and maybe this was his ticket to fame, or even a little dough he could send back home just to let Della know he was actually working. Her letters had begun to concern him. If he could answer the next one with a chunk of money, enough to help her get by for a few months and convince her he was doing his best in a bad situation, perhaps his dear wife would cut him some slack. So far he’d sent nothing but words on paper. He reckoned there was some cash in the envelope Pete Mazza handed him in St. Louis, but he felt like he’d made a promise not to open it unless things got really bad. Besides, he still had to get to Europe and through Asia and across the Pacific and home—another twenty-four thousand miles or so. He needed money.

Their anticipation grew as the theater fell dark and the hubbub died down, and then the screen flickered to life. The first Universal Newsreel clip featured Otto Hillig and Holger Hoiriis, in jittery black-and-white, embarking on a daring flight to Denmark from the quaint Catskills town of Liberty, New York, in a 300-horsepower Bellanca monoplane. Then they watched footage of the opening of a new traffic artery into New York to help alleviate bridge jams, and a wild wine-barrel-rolling race in Vincennes, France, and a Tacoma, Washington, man named Jack Rousseau building an eight-foot-tall house of cards using 135 decks. Impressive.

Then the next clip started, three minutes into the newsreel.

Texan on round-the-world walking tour! the opening slide read. Plennie Wingo of Abilene is different ~ he does it in reverse.

The streets were packed with pedestrians, dozens of them, women wearing long-sleeved dresses and cloche hats and men in suits and ties and skimmers. They carried newspapers and purses and shopping bags, and they each looked to be headed somewhere important. The camera captured shots from various angles to show little Plennie Wingo in all his unlikely glory. Wearing the same suit and tie he wore when he left Texas, Plennie crossed streetcar tracks like a professional, dodged two halting automobiles, weaved through a cluster of urban pedestrians streaming off a curb at Madison Street, and navigated up a wide set of stairs. Near the end, the camera focused on his face, his mirrored glasses, fedora, and broad smile.

No one seemed to notice or care that walking among them, dodging cars at busy Chicago intersections and weaving his way through oncoming throngs, was a man turned the wrong way. No one besides a Chicago police officer, that is, and he appeared to offer some firm instruction to the backward walker. The striking thing was that nothing was all that striking. If there were gawkers, the cameraman missed them. One man walking behind Plennie turned to the

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