Vintage New Kids on the Block Pin 📌 Jonathan Knight, Boston, MA 1980s NKOTB Blue

Still Remember the Face That Papered Every Locker Door? 🎤 A Vintage 1989 Jonathan Knight New Kids on the Block Pinback Button, Blue Sky

Size: 1 1/2"

No name, no band logo, nothing on the front but Jonathan Knight's big grin against a blue sky with a few white clouds. In 1989 it didn't need a name - every kid in America knew that face. The only printing is around the rim in red: BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083 and ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC. The photo sits under a clear cover, with a cream back and a long steel bar pin, and none of these have ever been worn.

📅 The 1989 is the date

Don't let the 2011 throw you - it's the street number of Button-Up's shop on Austin in Troy, and 48083 is the Troy ZIP code. The year is in the copyright line. Big Step Productions held the copyright on the band's merchandise and also co-produced their Saturday morning cartoon with DIC in 1990. Button-Up had been making licensed band buttons since at least the early '80s, first on Ryan Road in Warren - a 1984 Huey Lewis and the News button carries that address - and then up in Troy, in Oakland County just north of Detroit. I get a kick out of that: a Boston band, and the button comes out of a Michigan job shop.

🎤 The quiet one

Jonathan was the older of the two Knight brothers in New Kids on the Block, alongside Jordan, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood, the group Maurice Starr put together in Boston in 1984. Jordan was the flashy one; fans called Jonathan the quiet one, and plenty of them liked him best for it. Hangin' Tough went to No. 1 on the album chart in 1989, the year on this rim.

In 1994, in the middle of the Face the Music tour, Jonathan left. At the time he said he'd hurt his back when a horse threw him; years later he said the band had slid from arenas to theaters to nightclubs, and he wanted to get on with his own life as a young gay man. In 2000 he talked openly about the generalized anxiety disorder he'd lived with since the early days of the band. He spent the years after fixing up houses, came back for the 2008 reunion, and in March 2021 HGTV premiered Farmhouse Fixer, a show he dreamed up himself, restoring old New England farmhouses with designer Kristina Crestin.

📞 The hotline

Ask anybody who was a kid with a landline. In 1989 a company called Info-tainment ran a 1-900 number where fans could hear the band's news for $2 the first minute and 45 cents a minute after, with part of the money going to United Cerebral Palsy. Fans still swear it was taking a hundred thousand calls a week. However many it was, by 1991 the New Kids topped Forbes' list of the highest-paid entertainers, ahead of Michael Jackson and Madonna.

💃 Before she was J.Lo

Here's one collectors love: when New Kids performed Games at the 1991 American Music Awards, one of their backup dancers was a young Jennifer Lopez, just before she became a Fly Girl on In Living Color. She's called that night her break.

📌 About these

The photo button goes back to 1896, when Whitehead & Hoag patented the celluloid pinback - a metal shell, a printed picture, a clear cover and a pin - and these are built the same way. Every one I have is this same unused 1 1/2 inch Jonathan. Put it on a jean jacket, in a shadow box with a ticket stub, or give it to the friend who still says he was the cute one. The supply is finite - nobody's making 1989 Big Step buttons again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.