Short Stories · 5:26
Marion Stokes
The Philadelphia woman who recorded TV news around the clock for more than 30 years.
From 1979 until she died in 2012, Marion Stokes recorded TV news around the clock. Up to eight VCRs running at once. CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Fox, commercials and all. By the end she had more than 70,000 tapes.
Before all that she was a librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia, a civil rights organizer, and the co-producer of a public affairs show called Input. She believed the news could be spun and history could get retold, so she kept the receipts.
After she passed, her son donated the whole collection to the Internet Archive, and it's still being digitized. If you want to go deeper, check out the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
Sources
- Free Library of Philadelphia, "Marion Stokes Saved Everything"
- Free Library of Philadelphia, "Input and the Extraordinary Marion Stokes"
- Atlas Obscura, "The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History"
- The Philadelphia Inquirer (2019)
- Internet Archive blog, Marion Stokes posts
- Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (dir. Matt Wolf, 2019)
- Snopes (2022)
