By Darragh Doiron
The Port Arthur News
May 09, 2008 04:43 pm
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BONNIE WILKINSON
Age: 80
Occupation: Port Arthur supporter
Community connection: Port Arthur Convention & Visitors board member
Fast fact: She is a multiple Best Step-On Guide winner from the East Texas Tourism Association.
Quick Quote: “We had a different life when we were young.”
When Bonnie Wilkinson was younger, she and girlfriends would stand on the seawall and wave at ships full of sailors headed to port.
“Stay right there,” they’d call to the young women.
“We will,” her gang would yell back.
Those girls knew better. They’d be long gone when those sailors hit land.
That’s the kind of story she loves to tell as a step-on guide for the Port Arthur Convention & Visitors Bureau. Guests to the area eat it up.
“Most of our visitors are old, and we had a different life when we were young,” Wilkinson said.
They want to hear about the historic homes and the people who lived in them. You want a story? She knows them all.
“I ought to … I grew up here,” she said.
Patti Salter and the rest of the Bureau folks nominated Wilkinson, 80, as a Senior on the Go.
“She has been a Godsend for our office,” Salter said.
After 15 years of hopping on buses to give visitors a taste of Port Arthur, she is retiring. But Salter said she promised to keep busy.
“She is going to continue coming in office to help make visitor packets and fulfill visitor requests,” Salter said. “We are going to miss being able to call and have her jump on a bus at a moments notice.”
Salter calls her a champion and advocate of tourism, a dedicated volunteer and board member and very knowledgeable about the area.
Years ago she and Tom Dunlop volunteered to be guides and Wilkinson had a problem with her provided script.
“I can’t read and look at people at the same time,” she said.
Dunlop advised her to just tell ‘em what she knows, so she ripped that paper up and did it Bonnie style.
She might slip in a story about Olan Morman, one of her two older brothers were Baptist preachers, and how protective they were of her. She thought being related to a preacher was an automatic “in” with the choir.
“I didn’t know I couldn’t sing and they asked me to get out of the choir,” she said.
Wilkinson later found a church duty that allowed her to vocalize.
“I was real good at ‘Amen!,’ ” she said.
One of Wilkinson’s anecdotes involves a Chicago teacher who loved her guide’s cowgirl T-shirt. Real sparkly earrings were glued onto the image and they caught the visitor’s eye. The woman raved so much, that Wilkinson sneaked home and changed, then gave the shirt to the visitor. Wilkinson got a slew of letters from the teacher’s students saying that they heard Texans are so nice that they’ll give you the shirt off their back.
Contact this reporter at ddoiron@panews.com.
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