Marion Stokes had a strange habit. While most people just watched TV and forgot about it, she thought something bad was happening. In 1975, she bought a Betamax video recorder and began taping shows. She recorded bits of sitcoms, nature programs, and news. What started small turned into a project that took over her whole life.
Everything changed on November 4, 1979. That day, news about the Iran Hostage Crisis started playing on TV, according to Atlas Obscura. Stokes pressed record on her machine. Her son Michael Metelits said later in a film about her life called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project that “she hit record and she never stopped.” From that moment until she died in 2012, Stokes taped TV all day and all night. She captured news shows, ads, talk shows, and everything else on different channels.
Stokes worried a lot about truth and information. She thought that without proof, people could change history or make it disappear. She was right to worry. Most people thought TV networks saved everything they showed. But that was wrong. TV studios were erasing old tapes and using them again to save money and space. They were basically throwing away their own history.
She saw how powerful TV really was
Stokes knew more about television than regular people. She worked at the Free Library of Philadelphia for almost 20 years. She got fired in the early 1960s, probably because she organized for the Communist party. Between 1968 and 1971, she helped make a show called Input. It was a Sunday morning talk show in Philadelphia. She made it with John S. Stokes Jr., who later married her. The show brought in teachers, community leaders, activists, scientists, and artists. They talked about fairness in society and other big topics.
Her project got bigger and harder to manage. CNN started in 1980 and brought news that ran all day. Soon Stokes had three, then four, then five machines recording at the same time. Sometimes she had eight going at once in her home. The family had to plan trips around changing tapes.
People close to her said things like “We’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes.” The tapes ran out every six to eight hours. Stokes almost never missed changing them. Like a father who gave up his own dream to clear his son’s $68,000 student debt, Stokes gave up having a normal life for something she thought mattered more.
The tapes kept piling up. In the end, she had about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes. Stokes bought nine more apartments in Philadelphia just to store them all. She stopped going out much and focused only on recording. She became someone who stayed inside all the time. On December 14, 2012, she was dying. Her last recording caught the news about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
After Stokes died, she left all the tapes to her son. She did not tell him what to do with them except to give them to a charity. A year later, her son gave them to the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Moving the tapes needed four big shipping containers. It cost her family $16,000. The Internet Archive had never gotten such a big collection before.
They said they would turn all the tapes into digital files. They thought it would cost $2 million. Right now in October 2025, they still have not finished. They do not have enough money. But the tapes they have already worked on show something amazing.
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1949506613695406232 What Stokes recorded between 1975 and 2012 is the only complete collection of TV from that time that still exists. Her choice to keep recording, even when it meant rushing home constantly to change tapes, proves how far someone will go for what they believe is right.
Published: Oct 28, 2025 11:46 am