SALEM — Salem native Matthew Wilkinson is moving a scorching 4 degrees south of the equator (for perspective, Salem is 42 degrees north) to a rural, island nation where more than 850 distinct languages are spoken.
Wilkinson plans to live permanently in Papua, New Guinea, with his wife and three young daughters to work as Christian missionaries. They move to Texas next month to enter a training program with To Every Tribe Ministries before the big move next September.
You may remember Wilkinson, who graduated in 1997 from Salem High School, where he played football and wrestled and was captain of the lacrosse team. His father, John Wilkinson, is a longtime Salem schools custodian and active in the Salem VFW. His mother, Kathleen Wilkinson, a former YMCA employee, now works for the Salem Housing Authority.
Wilkinson, 29, worked at Hobbs in the Salem Willows for many years, and his wife, Leanne, was a hostess at the Hawthorne Hotel for two summers. The couple met at the University of Maine Farmington, where they became Christians and married in their junior year. They settled in Maine, where Wilkinson works as a crisis counselor, and his wife home-schools the children.
Wilkinson has taken seminary classes and said he will learn pidgin English — Papua's trade language — and work to "plant churches." The family will likely live in remote locations in the northwest of the country; one possibility is an island on Chambri Lake.
"It takes six hours driving through the jungle and several hours on a canoe to get there," he said.
In case you weren't exactly sure where to pinpoint Papua on a map (don't worry; we checked the atlas, too), it inhabits the eastern half of an island in the Pacific Ocean, north of Australia, in a region referred to as Melanesia.
If you want to give Wilkinson a shout, e-mail him at mwilkinson@toeverytribe.com.
Rip Torn Day
Tomorrow is Shredding Day in Salem.
Anyone with personal documents, bank statements or old love letters they want destroyed can take them to North Shore Recycled Fibers, 53 Jefferson Ave., from 8 a.m. to noon. The first file box is free, and additional boxes cost $5 each.
The event is co-sponsored by the City of Salem Recycling Committee.
Dinner for 60
State Rep. Robert DeLeo, D-Winthrop, who hopes to succeed embattled House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, hosted an intimate dinner for dozens of state representatives last Thursday night at the Toolhouse, a swanky Worcester restaurant.
Seated at one of the tables was our own state Rep. John Keenan.
"It was a very good showing of support for Chairman DeLeo," Keenan said of the man who heads the House Ways and Means Committee.
Keenan, by the way, was able to attend only because the Conservation Commission meeting for that night was canceled. Keenan was on the agenda seeking approval for some work at his new house in North Salem.
Gulu-Gulu gone
Bad news for Gulu-Gulu, that hip little café.
Not the one in Salem. The one in Lynn.
Owner Steve Feldmann opened the original Gulu-Gulu in Lynn in 2005 at the height of the downtown condo boom in that city. He closed it this week.
Unfortunately, it fell victim to the downturn in the real estate market and unrealized dreams in Lynn's Central Square. Last year, he opened his second Gulu-Gulu on the edge of Lappin Park (near the "Bewitched" statue) and is still going strong. On a blog, Feldmann called the Salem cafe an "enormous success."
He also gave credit to the original Gulu-Gulu.
"I never could have built the one in Salem if I hadn't done the Lynn one first," he wrote.
Plummer plaque
Harvard University was kind enough to send us a photo of the memorial tablet recently placed in Harvard's Memorial Church in honor of Caroline Plummer, the 19th-century Salem woman who donated funds to establish the Plummer Chair of Christian Morals at Harvard.
And, by way of a clarification, Plummer Hall at the Peabody Essex Museum is so named because of a donation Miss Plummer made to the Salem Athenaeum to construct a building to house its collections. The Athenaeum, of course, later moved to Essex Street and left Plummer Hall behind.
Strong women
The Hawthorne Hotel is hosting auditions today for "Iron Brides," a reality TV show out of New Hampshire.
On the program, wives-in-waiting are tested in life skills, athletic ability and personality. The grand prize is a $9,000 wedding photography and video package.
Water world
People in Salem sure know how to stay hydrated.
The city used some 2 billion gallons of water over the last year — enough to fill 32 billion 8-ounce cups of water.
The latest figures from the Salem and Beverly Water Supply Board actually show that Salem used less water than the previous year (2.1 billion gallons).
But we use far more than people in Beverly, who have consumed "only" 1.4 billion gallons of water in the last year. In fact, Salem uses nearly 60 percent of the water supplied to both cities.
And here are a few more figures.
In the last three years, Salem used about 6.2 billion gallons of water. If you built a 10-foot swimming pool the size of a football field, you'd have to construct more than 1,431 of them to hold that much water.
John v. Joan II
Her name wasn't on the ballot, but she still drew a significant number of write-in votes on Election Day.
And we're not talking about Hillary Clinton.
City Councilor Joan Lovely picked up nine write-ins for state representative this year. Lovely lost to John Keenan for a rep seat in 2004 and wasn't a candidate this time, but apparently there are still some who thought she should have been.
Of course, Keenan, who ran unopposed, cruised to another two years at the Statehouse with 14,743 votes.
But in one precinct, Lovely received more votes as a write-in than Chuck Baldwin, a candidate from the Constitution Party, got for president.
So that's got to count for something, right?
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