On April 15, 1931, a man named Plennie Wingo began an attempt to walk across the United States and eventually the entire world backwards. He finished his trek across the United States on October 24, 1932, which earned him a Guinness Book of Records listing as the “greatest extent of reverse pedestrianism.”
The native of Abilene, Texas, fell short of his attempt to circumnavigate the world backwards when he was arrested in Istanbul, Turkey, for being a public nuisance.
His unusual attempt was sparked by the depression, where many people were desperately seeking a way to stand out from the crowd and possibly earn some sponsorship money. Other unsual events at the time included a man who sat on top of a flag pole for 48 hours and a man who took 21 days to push a peanut to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado using only his nose.
Wearing a special pair of glasses with rear view mirrors attached to the sides so he could see where he was going, Wingo began his trek in Santa Monica, California. In the map below, you can see that part of Wingo’s backward walk across American included passing through southern New Mexico, likely through the towns of Lordsburg, Deming and Las Cruces.
I checked Newspapers.com for any stories I could find about his stops in southern New Mexico, but found nothing. The closest I got was a wire story service about him in the El Paso Times, but there was no local interview with the man that I could find.
He wore out 12 or 13 pairs of shoes during his backward walk across the United States. His journey was delayed for several weeks when he stepped in a pothole in Robertsville, Ohio, and broke his ankle.
After his debacle in Europe, Wingo apparently gave up the idea of walking backwards all around the world. He sailed back to New York, caught a ride to California and then decided to walk backwards from there to his home state of Texas. His second American journey, however, was also filled with setbacks.
While backwards walking from Los Angeles he followed the Pacific coast road to San Diego, then encountered brutal heat in the Arizona desert. He again ended up in jail, this time in Phoenix for simply walking backwards through the city. Further on in his journey, he was forced to spend a night in a phone booth to escape a pack of coyotes.
He eventually made it to Fort Worth (probably including another passage across New Mexico), and despite worldwide publicity that he thought would bring him fortune, he only had $4 in his pocket when his journey ended.
His later years were spent working as a cook.
But never one to give up, Wingo decided to celebrate the nation’s 200th anniversary in 1976 with another backwards walking excursion. This 404-mile trip took him from San Francisco to Santa Monica and he did it at the age of 81.
He lived out his years in relative obscurity, dying in 1993 in his home state of Texas at the age of 98.
There are several links on the Internet to Plennie Wingo if you’re curious to learn more about him. The one below seemed to have the most detail, especially about his adventures and misadventures through Europe:
aero-cordero.com 