Marion Stokes | |
|---|---|
 Stokes as a young woman | |
| Born | Marion Marguerite Butler (1929-11-25)November 25, 1929 Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | December 14, 2012(2012-12-14) (aged 83) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupations | Television producer, archivist |
| Spouse | John Stokes Jr. |
Marion Marguerite Stokes (néeButler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an Americanaccess television producer, businesswoman, investor,civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, andarchivist. She was especially known for recording, saving, and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours oftelevision news footage from 1977 until her death in 2012, a total of 35 years.[1][2] She had been operating nine properties and three storage units by the time of her death.[3] According to theLos Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary filmRecorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."[1]
Marion Marguerite Butler, later named Marion Marguerite Stokes, was born on November 25, 1929, inGermantown, Philadelphia.[4] She graduated fromGirls' High.[5] As a young woman, Stokes became politically active and was involved with a number of left-wing organizations. She was courted by theCommunist Party USA, who sought to develop her as a potential leader.[6] She was the Philadelphia chair of theFair Play for Cuba Committee and was involved in thecivil rights movement, organizing five buses from Philadelphia for theMarch on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and participating in efforts to desegregateGirard College.[5]
Stokes worked as a librarian for theFree Library of Philadelphia for almost 20 years. In the early 1960s, she was fired, likely due to her political activities.[7]
In 1960, she married teacher Melvin Metelits, also a member of the Communist Party, and had a son with him.[5] Stokes was spied on by theFederal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her husband and son attempted to flee the United States anddefect toCuba.[6] They spent time inMexico waiting for a Cuban visa, but were unable to obtain one.[8] Metelits and Stokes separated in the mid-1960s when their son was four.[6]
She was on the founding board of theNational Organization for Women.[5]
From 1967 to 1969, Stokes co-produced a Sunday morning television show in Philadelphia,Input, with her husband John.[4] Its focus was onsocial justice.[9]
Stokes has been called a pioneer and visionary[10] who committed much of her life to preserving televisual history. Her primary objective was to "protect the truth" fromfake news and to let people assess the archived material objectively.[8] Some selected programs that she recorded wereThe Cosby Show,[11]Divorce Court,[10]Nightline,[12]Star Trek,[13]The Oprah Winfrey Show,[14] andThe Today Show.[14]
Family outings with her husband and children were planned around the length of aVHS tape. Every six hours, when the tapes ran out, Stokes and her husband switched them out. Later in life, when she was less agile, Stokes trained a helper to do the task for her.[15] The archives grew to about 71,000 tapes (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media).[16][15]VHS andBetamax tapes (up to eight hours each) stacked in her home and apartments she rented just to store them.[2]
Stokes started the taping project because she became convinced there was a lot of detail in the news at risk of disappearing forever. Her son, Michael Metelits, toldWNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to [the] task [of creating an archive]."[3] She began recording the news non-stop in 1979 during theIranian hostage crisis.[17] Some of Stokes's tape collection consisted of24/7 coverage ofFox,MSNBC,CNN,C-SPAN,CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separateVCRs in her house. Also included are a 1984JVC VHS deck set recording regular programs fromBoston in a six-hour Extended Play format.[18] Stokes's final recording took place on December 14, 2012, as she was dying; it captured coverage of theSandy Hook massacre.[4][8]
Stokes's collection is not the only instance of massive television footage taping, but her care in preserving the collection is unusual. Known collections of similar scale have not been as well-maintained and lack the timely and local focus.[19]
Stokes bought manyMacintosh computers.[15] Until the time of her death, 192 of the computers remained in her possession. Stokes kept the unopened items in a climate-controlledstorage garage for posterity. The collection, speculated to be one of the last of its nature remaining, sold oneBay to an anonymous buyer.[20] Stokes invested in Apple stock with capital from her in-laws while the company was still fledgling. Later, she encouraged her already rich in-laws to invest in Apple, advice they took and profited from. Stokes then allocated part of her profits to her recording project.[10]
Stokes received half a dozen daily newspapers and 100–150 monthly periodicals,[3] collected for half a century.[15] She also accumulated 30,000–40,000 books. Metelits told WNYC that in the mid-1970s the family frequented bookstores to purchase $800 worth of new books.[3] She also collected toys and dollhouses.[21]
Stokes bequeathed the entire tape collection to her son Michael Metelits, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to theInternet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Fourshipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters inSan Francisco,[2] a move that cost her estate $16,000.[21] It was the largest collection the Internet Archive had ever received.[22] The organization agreed todigitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of October 2025[update], the project is still incomplete, partially due to lack of funding.[23][24][2]
A documentary about her life,Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,[25] was directed byMatt Wolf[26] and premiered at the 2019Tribeca Festival.[27][6][28] A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than seven hundred hours of Stokes's tapes, titledInput, was published in Fall of 2023.[29]
In 2024,UK's The Duke Mitchell Film Club featured the archive for their DukeFest.[30]
Some might characterize Stokes's activities as hoarding, a compulsive act performed by eccentrics and neurotics unable to let go of things. But others might consider her practice one of radical historiography, Stokes's fundamental project being one of liberation: of truth, of knowledge, and, ultimately, of people.
Marion Stokes, a child of the Great Depression, spent her life saving everything – literally. The Philadelphia resident kept everything from newspapers and electronics to empty cigarette packets and sticky-notes. Among the cardboard boxes and magazine stacks in her home were 140,000 cassette tapes containing recordings of all local and national TV news programs from every channel.
Marion Stokes was a hoarder. When she died last year, her family had to figure out what to do with 9 separate residences and 3 storage locations full of stuff—everything from tens of thousands of books to decades-old Apple computers. This is the story of how they found a home for the strangest artifact in her collection—140,000 videocassettes filled with 35 years of round-the-clock cable TV news.
Marion Marguerite Stokes, 83, a librarian and social justice advocate who was a coproducer of a 1960s Sunday morning TV talk show entitled Input, died of lung disease Friday, Dec. 14, at her home in Rittenhouse Square.
Fueling the obsession was a kind of altruism. No one else was collecting the footage — certainly not anyone that can be trusted. Someone had to do something. Marion took on the task for the betterment of society.
From 1977 to 2012, she recorded 140,000 VHS tapes worth of history. Now the Internet Archive has a plan to make them public and searchable.
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) [is a] portrait of a woman who between 1979 and her death in 2012 obsessively taped TV news twenty-four hours a day, amassing a "secret archive" of 70,000 tapes.
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