A certain rhythm to her life
The digitization of such a huge collection will take a number of years
The show opens as it has since launching a year prior, with a dark set and the sounds of barely audible conversation. The Input logo pops up in the center of the screen, all lowercase, with a trio of curved arrows pointing out inside the “P.” The opening strains of Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas” are plucked softly on a nylon guitar.
The title of the October 12th episode follows in three parts: “Women,” “Part 1,” “Their Place.” The lights fade up, revealing the full stage. It’s changed a good deal since last year. The eight guests are seated in a semi-circle, the small stage now gone. In the middle is a familiar face beneath beehive hair. A green peacoat and red dress cover her slight frame. She takes occasional drags from the cigarette in her left hand, the smoke rising as others speak.
Her confidence was present from day one, waxing thoughtfully on a wide range of topics. Her title card, too, remains unchanged: Marion Metelits: Wellsprings Ecumenical Center.
“What we find is that, while women are supposed to be the most materialistic because they’re supposed to be waiting in the home to buy some more gadgets and so on,” she begins, “it is really the quality of the executive which places the material gain first, rather than human values. I can’t define that as masculine or feminine, but rather materialist or materialistic. I think men need to be liberated, too.”
Her frequent appearance on the WCAU current affairs program is due, in no small part, to her role behind the camera. She serves as coproducer with future husband (and fellow frequent guest), John Stokes Jr., whose name she’ll soon adopt. The show, meanwhile, will run another two years on the local CBS affiliate, before disappearing altogether for nearly half a century. This is the late-60s/early-70s. There exists no expectation that a local news talk show might live on past its air date, however groundbreaking it might be.
The programmed marked neither the beginning or end of Stokes’ activism. Earlier in the decade, she found herself fired from the Free Library of Philadelphia, most likely due to her connection to the American Communist Party. An attempt to flee the country for Cuba over fears of government surveillance fell short. So, too, did her marriage to Melvin Metelits, following the birth of their son, Michael.
Three years after Input’s dissolution, Stokes purchased a Betamax video cassette recorder, her continued fascination with the media leading her to record various television snippets. Her fascination with technology, meanwhile only deepened. Within a few years, she’d grown smitten with a home brew computer startup, investing a significant sum of money shortly after the Cupertino firm went public.
Over the years, the Betamax (and subsequent VCRs) occupied an increasingly central role in her life. The act of recording hit a fever pitch at the close of the 70s, spurred on by the Iran Hostage Crisis and soon fueled by the launch of the first 24-hour cable news channel 14 months later. For 35 years, until her death at the end of 2012, recording became its own 24-hour-a-day job.
Stokes developed a methodical system, utilizing eight VCRs running simultaneously. Six-hour tapes were employed, hitting “record” before bed and switching them out first thing in the morning. Stokes and her husband did a majority of the tape swapping, though she’d later employ family members and eventually a care worker as her health began to fade.
“Pretty much everything else took a back seat,” Michael noted, following her death. “It provided a certain rhythm to her life, and a certain amount of deep, deep conviction that this stuff was going to be useful. That somehow, someone would find a way to index it, archive it, store it–that it would be useful.”
The stocks funded her life’s work, along with the purchase of hundreds of Apple computers and peripherals, stored in a climate-controlled garage. Stokes purchased nearly 40,000 books, housed along with 50 years of newspapers and magazines. The family rented nine apartments and three storage spaces to hold onto her collection, as she shunned modern electronic archival technologies like TiVo. By the time she died of lung disease at 83, the project had amassed 71,000 tapes. In her final moments, she captured news coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
A year later, Michael gifted the collection to the Internet Archive. “In just a few days, four large shipping containers on trucks will be winding their way across the country to our Richmond, California physical archive,” the site’s television archivist, Roger Macdonald, noted in a blog post. “The digitization of such a huge collection will take a number of years and funding we have yet to raise.”
The bill to transport four shipping containers to Richmond, California cost the family $16,000.
“My hope is that [the collection] deepens public perception of not only how news was made, but the actual politics underlying the news, to help people have a more informed, intelligent engagement with politics,” he noted. “That was my mother’s dream for it.”
Digitization was projected to cost around $2 million, all told, with 20 machines running around the clock. The team began with the entire run of Input.
Sources:
Input - Marion Stokes & John S. Stokes, Jr. https://archive.org/details/marionstokesinput?tab=about
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-television-news-archive
TV producer’s collection of 840,000 hours of news tapes finds a home https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/09/us/pennsylvania-tv-news-archive/