Neil Bardhan: As I remember it, we had either just dropped my brother off at summer camp or we were about to pick him up near Hagerstown. And it was a motel, like a Days Inn, a Super 8, Holiday Inn kind of thing.
It must have been two stories tall, I feel like we were staying on the second floor, and let’s say we were in room 218. All the other rooms on our hallway were like a flea market, almost, right? They were all these members of the American political Items collectors, the APIC, of which my dad was a member, or, or at least an aficionado.
I don’t know if he had a membership card per se, or exactly how that all works out. But all these other rooms, they had their doors open, which is actually, if you think about it, pretty unusual for a motel. to have that experience for you to be able to pop in and out of multiple rooms, particularly when it’s strangers.
And so you would walk in and these people would have these old buttons and bumper stickers and tchotchkes and they’d be like laid out on the bed or the desk or in like a little display case. And so you could just walk into say room 202 and buy an Eisenhower button for 3 dollars and then you walked out and checked out the next room and oh gosh there’s a whole lot of JFK bumper stickers available to me all, you know, three for 5 or what was something like that. Uh, and I’ve never seen anything like it since then.
My name is Neil Bardhan, N E I L B A R D H A N as in Nancy. I am a storyteller, comedian, uh, nonprofit arts administrator is what I put on my taxes. And when I was about 10 years old my dad got really into political memorabilia, like campaign buttons and the like. He was a collector of them. I think it was the sort of hobby where it took him A minute, meaning a couple of years to land on, he wanted to focus on buttons.
Dad was active in this in the 90s really, before the internet, certainly as we know it, took off. And he wasn’t on eBay, he wasn’t poking around like that, um, and so if we were traveling, you know, visiting family, friends or something like that, he’d be like, Oh, there’s an antique store down there. Let’s, let’s stop in. And then either. Buy something or move on with it.
He grew up all over India. Um, he was one of, uh, five kids. He was the middle child. He was the oldest son. And came to the U S in 1966, right after he finished college, and he was starting a master’s program at Georgia tech. But yeah, my dad’s collection. Uh, a lot of buttons and in my head what, like, what I can picture in, in my house was certainly when I was growing up and then what exists out right now is a lot of, like, 60s and 70s era buttons, Humphrey, Nixon, Kennedy. I don’t think he loved showing it off exactly. I think he liked looking at it. I think he liked thinking about it. In some ways he was an introvert who just kind of liked to stand there and, and have a think about things.
So there was one display case. So picture a picture frame style, right? But maybe a foot by 18 inches and metal black framing and then a glass cover on it, but larger than a picture frame because it has to hold the depth of the buttons. And they’re placed on like a fabric or matting behind the glass. So there was something like that around, you know, when I was a kid, my childhood friends remember, and, and think about, they’re like, do you still have a lot of campaign buttons up in your house? Nobody else does that, right? I haven’t, I haven’t met other people who have Nixon bumper stickers floating around their house, but my dad did it.
So when I saw this Neil Benson jacket in the Atwater Kent collection, and it’s covered in pins and buttons, you know, those like, giveaway or $2 buttons. I immediately thought of my father.
Jamie J. Brunson: From WHYY, you’re listening to Philadelphia Revealed. I’m your host, Jamie Jay, Executive Director of First Person Arts, a nonprofit organization that believes everyone has a story to tell.
Across 10 episodes, you’re going to get a tour of the Atwater Kent collection, sometimes called Philadelphia’s Attic. It’s a collection that’s grown over decades, acquiring Philly’s material culture from individuals, families, institutions, sometimes literally from the trash. In every episode of this podcast you’ll learn about an object in the Atwater Kent collection and hear a story inspired by it from a First Person Arts storyteller. We think every Philadelphian will be able to see themselves in this collection and that learning about Philadelphia’s many histories can help us understand its present and future.
This is Episode 5. There is No Away.
Neil Bardhan: Here’s a question. Did Neil Benson ever wear this jacket, or was it just an item for display? And if he did wear it, was it an everyday sort of wear, or was it, I’m going to this fancy thing, or I need to display my work in a particular way tonight? How did he see this jacket as a jacket?
At some point, somebody asked me, you know, what color is the jacket? I don’t know what color the jacket is. The color of the jacket is buttons to me. The fabric is inconsequential if visible at all. So it’s dozens and dozens of buttons, you know, um. Um, some that say, let’s see what we’ve got here, native, I know, free William Penn, impeach Quayle first, stop Rizzo, the Philly one, I would imagine, a couple of smiley faces next to each other that like classic sixties smiley face, I see like four or five of those all clustered together. So I think there was some intentionality around placement and yet it still feels pretty kooky and free.
Jamie J. Brunson: Neil Benson was a lifelong Philadelphian. He was a photojournalist and salvage artist, among other things. But Neil Benson is no longer with us. He died in early 2023. In a message that was posted online after his death, Neil’s two older sisters, Ellen and Sally, wrote of their brother that, quote, there was nothing he loved more than beingin the center of an audience and regaling them with stories and jokes or making funny little gifts for people.
He was generous with his time and even with his limited money, Neil had the biggest heart and though he sometimes suffered from depression, he mostly lived his life full up and joyously, delighting in everyday things and the company of neighbors, family, divers, doctors, nurses, friends, grocery store clerks, and the mailman.
With a hearty laugh, a twinkle in his eye, a sly smile, and a funny story, he charmed them all. We are so grateful to have had Neil as our brother and we will miss him forever. He was difficult to live with and impossible to live without. End quote.
Among his legacies. Neil Benson leaves behind a jacket covered in buttons. Seven hundred and forty nine buttons, to be exact. That button-covered jacket is now in the Atwater Kent Collection. We wanted to know more about Neil Benson and his unique jacket, so we went to visit Neil’s sister Ellen at her home in Philadelphia.
Ellen Benson: As a kid, my family went to the shore in the summers, and Neil would collect popsicle sticks on the beach. That would amuse him all day.
Jamie J. Brunson: That amusement with collecting things stayed with Neil his whole life.
Ellen Benson: Neil would say that anything, if you have one of it, it’s just a trinket. If you have a hundred of them, it’s an installation. And that’s true about anything, whether it’s bottle caps lined up in a frame, whether it’s beer cans lined up on a shelf. Whatever it is, it’s the density and the multiplicity of it that makes it compelling. So he was very intentional about that.
Jamie J. Brunson: Ellen says that her brother believed that there is “no away” – Meaning that we can never truly get rid of anything. Neil believed that when we say that we are throwing something away, we’re really just moving it to another place, like a landfill. One of Neil’s mottos was that trash is simply a failure of imagination. Instead of getting rid of things, Neil Benson collected things and displayed them in his home.
Ellen Benson: His collections were carefully curated, so there’d be 75 typewriters, old, vintage, the black, you know, that you see in old movies, but they weren’t just piled anywhere, they were like a wall of them, like an exhibit in a museum, like an installation.
Jamie J. Brunson: For years, Neil Benson lived among his collections in Center City, Philadelphia, in a small house on Mole Street.
Ellen Benson: Let’s see, Neil had 80 neon signs, so the whole place was lit up in neon. He had, I don’t know how many hundreds of cartoon glasses. You know, there were Batman ones and Snow White ones. Everything was to the nth degree. It was a lot.
Jamie J. Brunson: Neil Benson worked as a photographer. In the years before digital photos took over, Neil had a darkroom in his home where he developed film. His photographs appeared in The Inquirer, Daily News, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Life, Time, and Philadelphia Magazine.
Ellen Benson: And he would get assignments or he would just go somewhere and then call AP or UPI and say I have Three Mile Island or he had the definitive archives on former mayor Frank Rizzo and MOVE.
He shot sporting events too and concerts. Springsteen and there’s many famous photographs of him. One of him with Mick Jagger at a concert where they’re both sort of in each other’s faces.
Jamie J. Brunson: The Atwater Kent Collection has over 30, 000 of Neil Benson’s images. Looking through them, it’s clear that Neil loved people. He was an extrovert who loved being around others. And when he wasn’t out and about, his friends would drop by.
Ellen Benson: People dropped in constantly. The door was open. It was right near City Hall. He was friendly with a lot of photographers from the Daily News, from the Inquirer. They all would drop in and out all the time. There were always people there.
Jamie J. Brunson: And when someone came through the front door of Neil’s home on Mole Street
Ellen Benson: You saw the jacket.
Jamie J. Brunson: The jacket.
Neil Benson’s button-covered jacket that caught the eye of our storyteller, Neil Bardhan. Ellen Benson says her brother had the jacket prominently displayed in the direct line of sight for anyone walking into Neil’s home.
Ellen Benson: It’s really like a quilt, you know, like a memory quilt.
Jamie J. Brunson: Here’s how Ellen describes it.
Ellen Benson: Did you ever see a Nonpareil candy that’s chocolate with all those little white things on it so you can hardly see the chocolate? These buttons are so, they’ve covered the jacket to the point that you can only see the buttons because he would get the buttons from wherever he had photo assignments because people would always make buttons just like they’d make t-shirts for anything and they range from really funny ones, like I see one that says, Feed My Ego, to a lot of them are ones, you know, Stop the Crosstown Expressway, and here’s a funny one, I guess, Reagan for Shaw. And so, yes, over the years, it was a real collection.
Jamie J. Brunson: The jacket used to hang on a door inside Neil’s home. It was his version of a display case like the one our storyteller Neil Barthan’s father had in their home. Ellen says she doesn’t remember her brother ever wearing the jacket.
Ellen Benson: Because the jacket was really an art piece and it weighed a ton. You can hardly lift that jacket. It’s very heavy. However, he wore Hawaiian shirts. The rest of his outfits were, In a similar vein, let’s say.
Jamie J. Brunson: In a similar vein, meaning that even Neil Benson’s clothing was a collection. Ellen says that her brother had more than 500 Hawaiian shirts, and he wore them all the time. And you know those oval shaped name patches that you might see on a mechanic’s shirt? Neil collected those too.
Ellen Benson: Neil had A shirt that said, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil. He had 50 of these patches, and they said, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil.
Jamie J. Brunson: Neil even collected other collectors. In 1992, he co founded the Philadelphia Art Gallery. Dumpster Divers, a group of like-minded salvage artists who collected items that had been discarded and turned them into art. At the time, Neil’s sister Ellen was working as a bank executive, but she was interested in what her little brother was up to with the dumpster divers.
Ellen Benson: And so I was “Friend of Diver”. I would sometimes go to the awards banquet at Famous Deli until when I was 55, I retired from banking, I got married for the first time and I started doing art. And now I’m 76, so it’s 26 years later. So when I retired I started getting more involved with the dumpster divers.
Jamie J. Brunson: Getting more involved with the dumpster divers meant attending the group’s meetings. Ellen says the Dumpster Diver meetings were very different from the bank executive meetings she was used to. At a typical Dumpster Diver meeting,
Ellen Benson: People would talk during it, people would interrupt, people would not listen and they’d ask you to repeat it over and over. It just was too chaotic for me.
Jamie J. Brunson: But, Ellen says the Dumpster Divers did manage to get things done at their meetings.
Ellen Benson: There were many orders of business where people would bring in articles about shows that people might want to go to or that one of us was in. There were field trips to be organized, to junkyards. There were newsletter articles. There were diver alerts, like you could get a diver alert ‘somebody put something out in the trash at, you know, Germantown and Hortter Street’ and stuff like that. And so somebody was always in charge of herding cats.
Jamie J. Brunson: Despite the chaos and the cat herding, Neil Benson loved his community of dumpster divers. And that love was reflected in Neil’s first agenda item for every dumpster diver meeting. Ellen says that before getting down to business, Neil made sure that everyone knew when the community would come together again.
Ellen Benson: The first purpose of the meeting was to decide where the next meeting was. This was when Neil’s, okay.
Jamie J. Brunson: For 32 years, Neil Benson had perfect attendance at every monthly meeting of the Dumpster Divers. Then, in early 2023, a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer announced, ‘Neil Benson, prolific photographer, recycling pioneer, salvage artist, and community activist, has died at 69’. Neil’s sister Ellen had been worried about him in the days leading up to his death.
Ellen Benson: He wasn’t doing too well in terms of breathing. And I kept saying to him, you have to go and get it checked out or you have to go to the emergency room and they admitted him. Now I, I thought they admitted him and they’re going to treat him and he’ll be okay. Well, They checked him out, and his heart was bad, his lungs were bad, they’d have to put him on a ventilator, and his kidneys were failing. He’d have to be on dialysis, none of which he would agree to anyway, and so that was it.
Jamie J. Brunson: Neil Benson was gone, but what about his stuff? What about the neon signs? The typewriters, and the hundreds of Hawaiian shirts?
Ellen Benson: He just assumed that dumpster divers would come and take the stuff. But the dumpster divers are all older. We’re old people. We need to get rid of our stuff, not have his stuff. Although his friend Leo came and got a ton of, some people did. But most people just wanted a piece, you know, a Hawaiian shirt, or a typewriter, or a cartoon glass. Not 500 cartoon glasses.
Jamie J. Brunson: Ellen says that truckloads of Neil’s possessions were taken to the dump.
Ellen Benson: Because we couldn’t even, you couldn’t even get in the front door. You couldn’t clean it out because you couldn’t, there were no passageways. It was like a floor-to-ceiling, just couldn’t do it.
Jamie J. Brunson: When we visited Ellen Benson in the spring of 2024, it had only been 16 months since her brother died. It’s clear that she’s thought a lot about Neil, his life, and those principles that were a big part of him. The belief that trash is simply a failure of imagination, and that there is no away.
Ellen Benson: To be someone who’s so into saving the planet, and into not discarding things, to leave the largest horde of stuff you’ve ever seen in your life, most of which no one’s gonna want, is a real contradiction.
I mean, what does that say? There had, maybe to him there was no away, but for us, who were dealing with all his stuff, there had to be an away, or we’d be buried in it. What did that say? I’m not sure. But that was a contradiction, I think, about Neil.
I think also collections say a lot about attributing value to things that intrinsically don’t have value. I mean, why have thousands of Happy Meal toys that most families discard ten minutes after the kid gets them? Why have thousands of pieces of broken neon that’s never going to actually fix any neon because you couldn’t live that long. So what does that say? It’s something about the joy of surrounding yourself with things that could be something else at some time, if only you had world enough and time, you know, and I’m sort of like that too.
Neil Bardhan: It seems Ellen’s words around this are very lovely and practical and wise all at once. I like her analysis of this contradiction, uh, that, that Neil Benson embodied, because it is true that there’s only so far that he can go with these items that he had. Is he necessarily saving it forever? Or is he just shrugging off the responsibility of these items to the next person down the line?
There’s a tension between the desire to acquire things and have them on hand so that you can make art with them or consume them or do whatever you want to and recognizing that there’s a limit to what you can actually do with all that, right? It sounds like Neil kind of lived right in that limbo of rationality with all this stuff.
I think one of the things that’s coming up as I’ve learned about Neil Benson and thinking about my dad’s collecting is the pipeline for acquiring a new item to the collection and then what do you do with it? Neil Benson, it sounds like it’s like I’m getting these at rallies. I’m getting these things that are going on the jacket. They’re going on the jacket. Or maybe he would have them all kind of sitting in reserves, ready, ready for something. And the way that my dad was very choosy about which items he was acquiring meant that he already had some idea of where it was going. So again, I think there’s kind of a spectrum in when you acquire an object, what are you, what do you do next with it and where do you expect it to go?
And so, yeah, it brings up for me, questions that I wish I could have asked my dad, but also it weren’t a priority for me when I was a kid about, ‘Oh, dad, when you get a new button, what do you do?’ Um, and it sounds like Ellen Benson has some ideas about how her brother was acquiring and putting this jacket together.
My dad passed away in May of 2021. And so he would have been 76. It was expected and unexpected, kind of all at once. He’d been, um, dealing with health problems for a while, and then the end came, um, a little sooner than we thought it would. And because of how he’d gotten sick, we just hadn’t dealt with some of the items around the house and other things, and so, more recently, my mom, my brother, and I have been processing, um, My mom, my brother and I have been quite physically processing as well as emotionally, um, some of the things that we’ve had in the home for 30, 40 years or so, some of which are his items, right?
So the campaign buttons, right? We’re holding on to those for now. Um, other things like his shirts that he wore to work and we, we don’t necessarily need other white shirts that don’t fit us. And, yeah, I think that a lot of people go through this where there’s the stuff you want to keep, there’s the stuff you are absolutely fine getting rid of, and then there’s a lot of stuff in this gray area where, yeah, it had meaning to this person, it has some meaning to you because of the connection to this person, but I had to have a conversation with my mom the other day about whether or not I wanted to take on the political items.
Am I going to be a member of the APIC now? I don’t think so, but maybe I become the custodian of these objects for a while. I think when you have somebody’s collection or other beloved items after they’re gone, it can still feel like they’re around in a way. And I think that is, again, kind of in contrast to like the, the shirts that he wore to work that don’t have any particular meaning to me. I’d rather have the buttons than his shirts for sure.
There’s also a question for me of ‘What did he want with these?’ I don’t know if he ever thought, ‘hey, I want these to go to my kids after I pass’, or ‘I want them to be in a museum’. And I don’t think he needed to. But going back to the Neil Benson question of ‘Where does your stuff go after you pass?’ If you’re somebody who’s intentionally acquiring all these things, maybe there’s a responsibility to your loved ones and the society and the planet and so forth to say, ‘Oh, this is what should happen’. Or, or ‘Here’s some ideas of what should happen. Feel free to hold on to them, but I would also be okay with any of the following other options’.
Jamie J. Brunson: Processing a loved one’s things after they’ve passed is something that most of us will experience at some point. It can be difficult to know what to do with a person’s stuff. And it can take time before we’re ready to deal. Sometimes we end up putting things in the attic where we know they’ll be safe, but out of sight.
But when the time is right, when we are ready to unpack the attic, we can learn a lot about a person from the things they left behind. And it can help us think about our own possessions.
Neil Bardhan: One of the things that stood out to me is there’s so much that I have that is interesting to me because it’s from my life.
None of it’s like a valuable piece of art that’s going to go in, you know, you know, a famous art museum or something like that. But these everyday items in 20, 50, 100 years. It might be a very interesting representation to somebody then of life right now, more so than the object for what it was or, or for my life.
The buttons of Neil Benson, the campaign buttons of my dad, they weren’t, most of them weren’t made to be increasing in value or sitting in a collection somewhere. They have a message. They have a purpose, a one-day usage and then, and then we move on. And I think again, Neil is playing kind of in the tension of that of, ‘Yeah, but what if I take this thing that was only supposed to exist August 5th, 1975, and I hold onto it and it has value because it’s in conversation with these other items?’
Jamie J. Brunson: That conversation among items, like the buttons on Neil Benson’s jacket, and the political memorabilia collected by Neil Bardhan’s father, is happening all around us, on our bookshelves, in our basements, and in Philadelphia’s Attic, the collection started by Atwater Kent back in 1938. The items in these collections were all special to someone at some point in time. They inspire our own memories and represent our shared history. They are Philadelphia Revealed.
The Philadelphia Revealed podcast is a production of WHYY in partnership with Rowhome Productions and First Person Arts. Our executive producers are Tom Grahsler, Alex Lewis, John Myers, and me, Jamie J. Brunson.
This episode of Philadelphia Revealed was written and produced by John Myers. Our lead producer is Jen Kinney. Final mixing and mastering by John Myers and Justin Berger. Our engineers are Al Banks, Diana Martinez, and Charlie Kier. Special thanks to the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University curatorial team, Page Talbott, Stacey Swigart, Melissa Clemmer, and Michael Shepherd. Special thanks also to Dr. Neil Bardhan, Jean Burke-Spraker, and Michaela Prell at First Person Arts.
Thank you to Michaela Winberg, Hannah Cornish, and Savannah Collins. Our theme music is by Paul Giess and Matt Jernigan. Thanks to Ms. Cramer and the Frankford High School drumline. Additional music by Paul Geis and Blue Dot Sessions. Philadelphia Revealed is a project of Drexel University in collaboration with WHYY and First Person Arts.
The Philadelphia Revealed podcast and additional programming has been supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. I’m Jamie J. Thanks for listening.
Philadelphia Revealed is part of the NPR Podcast Network.
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