Plennie Wingo - Who's That?

I was reading an article by Matt Taibbi the other day, and he mentioned someone I'd never heard of. The person's name, alone, was intriguing - Plennie Wingo. Who the heck was Plennie Wingo? Maybe you know if you are from Texas, or like 'modern' history, or the Guinness Book of World Records, or listen to Dave Anthony podcasts ( Plennie Wingo | The Dollop Episode #493!)... but, I don't fit super well in any of those categories but the history one, so I didn't know who Plennie Wingo was.

Plennie Wingo Walking Backwards. Check out those backwards mirrored glasses! (from Texas Monthly, Sept 2018)

So I looked him up. WOW. WOW! He walked from Texas to Turkey, backwards. And then did the same from California to Texas after coming back to the USA on a boat from Turkey and hitchhiking to CA. He did all this in 1931-32. A book was written about him by Ben Montgomery in 2018, called The Man Who Walked Backward (Excerpt from the book in Texas Monthly). I'm getting this from ILL and gonna read it, as well as Plennie's own book about his walking (Around the World Backwards). What a weird, strange, and potentially satisfying accomplishment. His story is one of doing well before the Great Depression, then basically having nothing and just deciding to do something after his daughter and her friends were chatting and said that all the strange things have been done already, like sitting on flag poles, and so on. And he basically said all the strange things hadn't been done yet, and resolved to walk backwards around the world.

So, in 1976, when Wingo was 81, he walked across the width of California, selling postcards for a dollar. My father was/is not as 'strange' as this, but it does remind me of my Dad, riding his bike from Lake Tahoe to Utah when he was 82. His dementia made bike riding impossible in the years since then (he's 88 now), but Dad's still here and he enjoyed my telling him the story of Plennie Wingo, as much as he possibly could!

Ohh, and for those, and there are many and they do have a right to say this, but for those who think Plennie was stupid and what he did was dumb, here's Matt Taibbi's take on that (from the article linked above):

I mentioned this (Plennie Wingo) once to a friend who asked me, “Why would he do that?” I scrunched up my nose. “What do you mean, why? Because!” That’s what we Americans do. It’s why for every fifty idiots who leaped to their deaths off cliffs flapping homemade wings, we had one Wright Brothers. That’s how this country has always worked. The line between outpatient and inventor here is and always has been thin, as is the line between con artist and marketing genius, as PT Barnum discovered. Outlandishness, difference, boldness. We’ve celebrated that from Patrick Henry to Hunter Thompson to Liberace. The freethinker was always a cherished archetype.

So, thanks for reading a little about Plennie Wingo and here's the open thread - and remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!