Marion Stokes captured on VHS, 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

In a storage unit somewhere in Philadelphia, 140,000 VHS tapes sit packed into four shipping containers. Most are hand-labeled with a date between 1977 and 2012, and if you pop one into a VCR you might see scenes from the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Administration, or Hurricane Katrina.

It’s 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

It’s also the life work of Marion Stokes, who built an archive of network, local, and cable news, in her home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died in 2012 at the age of 83 of lung disease.

The Internet Archive had received large collections of 100 or 200 tapes from individuals before, but nothing quite like this.

John Lynch, the director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive had a similar reaction. “Normally when we get someone who calls in about a collection, we try to send them somewhere else really quick, because the nature of our collection is that we record things ourselves,” he says. But there was a special significance in what Stokes had accomplished.

Stokes was a former librarian who for two years co-produced a local television show with her then-future husband, John Stokes Jr. She also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts. She began casually recording television in 1977. She taped lots of things, but she thought news was especially important, and when cable transformed it into a 24-hour affair, she began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time.

They are being archived here, the last four years are up already.

https://archive.org/details/tv#

https://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/the-incredible-story-of-marion-stokes-who-single-handedly-taped-35-years-of-tv-news