Marion Stokes facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Marion Stokes
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Stokes as a young woman
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| Born |
Marion Marguerite Butler
November 25, 1929 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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| Died | December 14, 2012 (aged 83) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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| Occupation | Television producer, archivist |
| Spouse(s) | John Stokes Jr. |
Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was a woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was a television producer, a civil rights activist, and a librarian. Marion Stokes is most famous for her incredible collection of television news.
For 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012, she recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of TV news. She believed it was important to save this information. Her huge project of recording the 24-hour news cycle is seen as a very important way of "guerrilla archiving." This means collecting and saving information in an unofficial but very dedicated way.
Contents
Her Amazing Collections
Recording TV News
Marion Stokes was convinced that many important details in the news could disappear forever. So, she started taping everything. She wanted to "protect the truth" and let people look back at what was reported.
Her collection included 24/7 coverage from channels like Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and C-SPAN. She used up to eight separate VCRs in her house to record all this.
Her family even planned outings around the length of a VHS tape. Every six hours, when the tapes ran out, Marion and her husband would switch them. Sometimes, they even cut short meals at restaurants to get home in time! Later, a helper took over this task.
Her collection grew to about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes. Many of these tapes could record up to eight hours of TV. She stacked them in her home and in other apartments she rented just to store them.
While other people have recorded a lot of TV, Marion Stokes's collection is special. She took great care to preserve her tapes. Her collection is also unique because it focused on timely and local news.
Apple Computers and More
Marion Stokes also collected many Macintosh computers. She bought them from the very beginning of the brand. When she passed away, she still had 192 of these computers. She kept new, unopened items in a special storage garage. This was to preserve them for the future.
She also invested in Apple stock when the company was new. She used some of her profits to help fund her recording project. This was very important, especially when videotapes were new and expensive.
Besides tapes and computers, Marion Stokes collected many other things. She received several daily newspapers and over 100 magazines each month. She collected these for half a century. She also gathered between 30,000 and 40,000 books. She even collected toys and dollhouses.
Television Producer
From 1967 to 1969, Marion Stokes co-produced a TV show in Philadelphia called Input. She worked on this Sunday morning show with her husband, John. The show focused on social justice, which means fairness and equality for all people.
Her Legacy
Marion Stokes left her entire tape collection to her son, Michael Metelits. She asked him to donate it to a charity of his choice. One year after her death, Michael gave the collection to The Internet Archive.
It took four shipping containers to move the tapes to the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco. This move cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection the Internet Archive had ever received.
The Internet Archive agreed to turn all the tapes into digital files. This huge project was expected to cost $2 million. It would take 20 digitizing machines and several years to complete, with volunteers working around the clock.
A documentary film about her life was made in 2019. It is called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. It premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
Marion Stokes is remembered as a pioneer and a visionary. She dedicated much of her life to saving television history. Her last recording was made as she was dying. It captured the news about the Sandy Hook massacre.
See also
- Vanderbilt Television News Archive
- Marion Stokes § Notes
- List of archivists
