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Marion Stokes

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For the similarly named historical Oregon architect (d. 1975), see Francis Marion Stokes. For the similarly named Austrian painter (d. 1927), see Marianne Stokes.

Marion Stokes
Stokes as a young woman
Born
Marion Marguerite Butler

(1929-11-25)November 25, 1929
Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
DiedDecember 14, 2012(2012-12-14) (aged 83)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation(s)Television producer, archivist
SpouseJohn Stokes Jr.

Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012,[1][2] at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units.[3] According to The Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."[1]

Early life

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Marion Marguerite Butler, later named Marion Marguerite Stokes, was born on November 25, 1929 in Germantown, Philadelphia.[4] She graduated from Girls' High.[5] As a young woman, Stokes became politically active and was involved with a number of left-wing organizations. She was courted by the Communist Party USA, who sought to develop her as a potential leader.[6] She was the Philadelphia chair of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and was involved in the civil rights movement, organizing five buses from Philadelphia for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and participating in efforts to desegregate Girard College.[5]

Stokes worked as a librarian for the Free 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 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her husband and son attempted to flee the United States and defect to Cuba.[6] They spent time in Mexico 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 the National 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 on social justice.[9]

Collections

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Television

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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" from fake news and to let people assess the archived material objectively.[8] Some selected programs that she recorded were The Cosby Show,[11] Divorce Court,[10] Nightline,[12] Star Trek,[13] The Oprah Winfrey Show,[14] and The Today Show.[14]

Family outings with her husband and children were planned around the length of a VHS 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 (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media)[16][15] VHS and Betamax 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, told WNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to [the] task [of creating an archive]."[3] Some of Stokes's tape collection consisted of 24/7 coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separate VCRs in her house. Also included are a 1984 JVC VHS deck set recording regular programs from Boston in a six-hour Extended Play format.[17] Stokes's final recording took place on December 14, 2012, as she was dying; it captured coverage of the Sandy 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.[18]

Macintosh computers

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Stokes bought many Macintosh computers.[15] Until the time of her death, 192 of the computers remained in her possession. Stokes kept the unopened items in a climate-controlled storage garage for posterity. The collection, speculated to be one of the last of its nature remaining, sold on eBay to an anonymous buyer.[19] 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]

Others

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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.[20]

Legacy

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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 the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco,[2] a move that cost her estate $16,000.[20] It was the largest collection the Internet Archive had ever received.[21] The organization agreed to digitize 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 April 2022, the project is still incomplete, partially due to lack of funding.[22][23][2]

A documentary about her life, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,[24] was directed by Matt Wolf[25] and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival.[26][6][27]

A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than seven hundred hours of Marion's tapes, titled Input, was published in Fall of 2023.[28]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Hadland, Grace (April 23, 2020). "Marion Stokes and the Power of Guerrilla Archiving". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on August 12, 2022. Retrieved August 13, 2022. 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.
  2. ^ a b c d Winsor, Morgan (December 9, 2013). "TV producer's collection of 840,000 hours of news tapes finds a home". CNN. Archived from the original on August 26, 2014. Retrieved August 18, 2014. 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.
  3. ^ a b c d Vogt, PJ; Goldman, Alex (December 12, 2013). "#9 – The Second Life of Marion Stokes". On the Media (Podcast). WNYC. Retrieved August 22, 2014. 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.
  4. ^ a b c Clark, Vernon (December 21, 2012). "Obituaries: Marion Stokes, coproducer of TV show". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original on September 14, 2022. Retrieved May 4, 2019. 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.
  5. ^ a b c d Dixon, Euell A. (February 9, 2020). "Marion Marguerite Butler Stokes (1929-2012) •". Black Past. Retrieved August 15, 2024.
  6. ^ a b c d "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project | 2019 Tribeca Festival". Tribeca. Archived from the original on April 30, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2019.
  7. ^ Al-Samarrai, Noor (April 29, 2019). "The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved August 15, 2024.
  8. ^ a b c "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project". recorderfilm.com. Archived from the original on June 21, 2021. Retrieved June 6, 2021.
  9. ^ "Marion Stokes Input TV Papers". Internet Archive.
  10. ^ a b c Coleman, Lauren deLisa (May 8, 2019). "How The Data This Woman Stored Could Change Your Life". Forbes. Archived from the original on January 1, 2021.
  11. ^ Ihaza, Jeff (June 19, 2020). "How Marion Stokes, an activist who recorded the news nonstop for decades, can help us understand this moment". Mic. Bustle Digital Group. Archived from the original on June 22, 2020.
  12. ^ Mosley, Tonya; Hagan, Allison (November 14, 2019). "Here & Now: 'Recorder': Meet The Woman Who Recorded 70,000 Tapes Of American News". WBUR-FM. Boston University. Archived from the original on November 17, 2019.
  13. ^ Hoffman, Jordan (April 30, 2019). "One woman's quest to record everything on TV led to her ruin". Polygon. Vox Media. Archived from the original on May 1, 2019. 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.
  14. ^ a b Phillips, Craig (June 9, 2020). "How Do You Sort Through 70,000 Videotapes?". PBS. PBS. Archived from the original on June 17, 2020.
  15. ^ a b c d Kessler, Sarah (November 21, 2013). "The Incredible Story of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years of TV News". Fast Company. Archived from the original on September 23, 2014. Retrieved August 22, 2014. 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.
  16. ^ Vogt, PJ (March 26, 2014). "The Internet Archive has Started Uploading 71,716 Videotapes Worth of TV News". On the Media. WNYC. Archived from the original on July 5, 2023. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  17. ^ "Marion Stokes 1984 Project on Internet Archive". Internet Archive.
  18. ^ Macdonald, Roger (November 22, 2013). "A Dream to Preserve TV News, on the Road to Realization… with Your Help". Internet Archive Blog. Retrieved January 15, 2017.
  19. ^ Rosen, Adam (March 19, 2014). "Macs in the Box: The Incredible Mac Collection of Marion Stokes. Now For Sale". Cult of Mac. Archived from the original on August 26, 2014. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  20. ^ a b Muse, Queen (December 9, 2013). "Librarian Recorded 800,000 Hours of News Footage Over 35 Years". NBC Philadelphia. Archived from the original on December 10, 2013. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  21. ^ Vadala, Nick (December 4, 2013). "Germantown's Marion Stokes archived 35 years of TV news". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original on August 26, 2014. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  22. ^ Ibrahim, Nur (April 26, 2022). "Did Marion Stokes Record the World's Largest Personal Archive of Television?". Snopes. Retrieved October 23, 2024.
  23. ^ Argyle, Samuel (April 30, 2019). "The woman who recorded 70,000 VHS tapes of... news". The Outline. Archived from the original on March 1, 2021. Retrieved February 13, 2023.
  24. ^ Smith, Imogen Sara (November 26, 2019). "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Shooting the Mafia, and The Irishman". Film Comment. Archived from the original on October 4, 2020. Retrieved November 20, 2020. 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.
  25. ^ "Input Book". Matt Wolf. Retrieved October 23, 2024.
  26. ^ Kalia, Ammar (October 4, 2019). "'Ahead of her time': the woman who recorded the news for 30 years". The Guardian. Archived from the original on October 4, 2019. Retrieved October 4, 2019.
  27. ^ Morgan, David (April 22, 2019). "15 highlights at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival in NYC". CBS News.
  28. ^ "INPUT". Pre-Echo. Retrieved October 23, 2024.
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