Jim Walsh
When John Wayne starred in The Quiet Man, one of the iconic films of the mid-20th century, John Benson was a 5-year-old boy living in Nahant.
John Wayne stood 6-feet-4 and in that film played a boxer — a fighter, who left that life and emigrated to the quiet seaside town of Innisfree, in county Sligo, Ireland, seeking to meld into his family’s peaceful, warm, Celtic tradition, or so he thought. It didn’t work out that way.
Had John Wayne’s “Quiet Man” come to Nahant, our small, quiet, green gem, dangling into the blue of Massachusetts Bay north of Boston, he might have seen that little boy, Johnny Benson, who would grow to be a different kind man whose legacy of work and dedication will be long lasting in Nahant.
John Benson was
Nahant’s Quiet Man.
I came to know John Benson some forty years ago when Polly Bradly was in the process of creating SWIM, our town’s premier environmental organization. John was at one with nature, especially with its birdlife. He and I were there at SWIM’s founding, investing time and energy toward improving and protecting the natural environment of our town from those who would harm it. He had spent his life here. Others who had not, who would intrude and harm his small town, would have to deal with John Benson and others like him. He was not loud about it but … he would not be moved.
The first intruder was the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, a newly created entity that was unable to appreciate the damage it would do to the waters off Nahant because, well, it had more important things to worry about. Nahant was a pebble in the ocean, not much more than that on a map, the smallest town in Massachusetts, and would, frankly, suffer whatever consequences might follow from the MWRA’s much-higher goals. Putting a giant sewage outfall pipe just off Nahant’s coast was no big deal to the leadership of the newly created “Authority.” It was a big deal to Polly Bradley, to John Benson, and to the many others who joined in that struggle.
Polly Bradley and her stalwart supporters persisted until success was achieved some 15 years later. The dreaded outfall pipe was moved from just off East Point to the deeper, distant waters of the Bay where it would disperse less harmfully.
John Benson was also firmly with those of us who would protect our pebble from another looming
institution, Northeastern University, a giant corporation with an attitude not much different from that of the MWRA. To Northeastern, Nahant was just a minor irritant, of no significance, as it worked on grander goals … 1,105 Nahanters came out to Town Meeting, the largest Town Meeting in the history of Nahant, and voted overwhelmingly to stand firm, to protect that which John Benson and others had devoted their lives to protecting. The land on which Northeastern sought to place a giant conference center would be taken—and protected — by Eminent Domain.
John Benson also served on the Open Space Committee, chaired by Linda Pivacek, a committee devoted to systematically developing environmental protections through zoning, among other things, which resulted in the 1990 Nahant Town Meeting creating protected Natural Resource Zones throughout town — from 40 Steps to East Point, from Short Beach to Bailey’s Hill, connected by the Nahant Heritage Trail, a nature walk that snuggles up to the Johnson School on its way. I will never forget seeing a tree filled with nesting Night Herons as I walked the trail late one afternoon. Nature can be magical.
When big institutions go about their business their narrow interests are central to themselves. As Polly Bradley noted a long time ago, the easiest way to clean up the water in Nahant Bay would be to lower the water quality standards and declare the water to be “clean.”
Some bureaucrats saw that as an option. Polly, John and the rest of us did not. It would be equally easy to say, if Northeastern planted a few trees around a five or six story concrete conference center, that would be equal to the loss of twelve acres of trees and shrubs, bushes and grass, nooks and nesting places for sea birds and migratory visitors stopping for a rest in their long journey north or south.
I often wonder which gave John Benson more joy and fulfillment: seeing a Snowy Owl on East Point or devoting himself toward ensuring that others — most of whom he would never know — would be able to have that same mysteriously intense experience.
John was also a decades-long member of the Nahant Democratic Town Committee. He, along with 70 other Democrats and unenrolled voters, worked on a project to send handwritten postcards to suppressed voters in purple states, encouraging them to vote and to stand up to those who would hinder them. In 2020 and 2022, we sent more than 12,000 encouraging postcards from our small town to individual Black voters in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. John was ready to go this year until his life, his sister-in-law’s and his nephew’s were cut tragically short because of a malfunction in a furnace that had been installed without legal authorization and without inspection.
In the last six months Nahanters sent 8,300 postcards to Georgia and North Carolina, addressed by one person directly to another person, asking them to vote on the issues important to them and to us all.
John Benson was there for all of us. Year after year, John Benson, the quiet man, the steady man, a man often working with women like Polly Bradley or Linda Pivacek who were not quite as quiet but just as steady.
A tree placed on Marginal Road, looking off toward the northeast, toward Egg Rock, the site long ago of the Nahant Lighthouse, the first piece of developed Nahant to be returned to nature and preserved forever for all to see. A tree, even more quiet and steady than John Benson, seems an appropriate tribute to him and his work.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.
