Marion Stokes died in December 2012, but the full story of her life took almost a year to come out.
According to her obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Stokes was a librarian during the 1950s and a political protester in the ’60s. From 1967 to 1969, she co-produced a local TV talk show. In the 1980s, she invested in Apple and Microsoft, which earned her a nice fortune. She was married three times and was twice divorced.
That was it. That was her life — except for one sentence in the article: “She also enjoyed watching cable news shows and collecting dollhouses.”
Often there is a story behind the story, and this was it. Eleven months later, an online magazine called Fast Company published its own article about Stokes — focusing on that one sentence.
She collected the news
Stokes, you see, had collected the news like nobody’s business. When 24-hour cable news started in the early 1980s, she recorded all the programs, using as many as eight VCRs. According to Fast Company,
“She’d feed a six-hour tape into the recorders late at night. She’d wake up early the next day to change them (or conscript family members to do the same if she wasn’t home). She’d cut short meals at restaurants to rush home before tapes ended. And when she got too old to keep up, she trained a younger helper named Frank to run the various recording equipment.”
The tapes were never used more than once; they just piled up as new ones were put in. After 35 years, Stokes left behind 140,000 videocassettes; they filled several apartments and an external storage unit. The tapes had cost her more than half a million dollars. It would take a person 342 years to watch all of them.
Stokes’s son, Michael Metelits, said his mother “was possessed … by a belief that the miles of news footage would someday, some way, prove useful to somebody.” He has donated the tapes to the Internet Archive, an online library that plans to digitize them and make them available to the public. But there is more, wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer, when it later revisited the story:
“[Metelits has] recovered about 50,000 books, most wearing halos of yellow sticky notes on which Stokes had scribbled a thought or comment. She kept enormous boxes of newspapers, most unsalvageable, and huge runs of magazines. Whenever she bought a toy for a grandchild, she got one for herself, filling her homes with thousands. She owned nearly 200 Mac computers and gave away many more.”
Perhaps it was Stokes’s training as a librarian that enabled her to label everything and keep it more or less organized; but still, her compulsive behavior governed her life. Less disciplined individuals who try this sort of thing often become hoarders.
Note that “hoarding” is the proper term; the German word Messie-Syndrom is fake pseudo-English.
But why?
Psychologists say hoarding may be suspected when so many things accumulate that furniture can no longer be used for its intended purpose: for example, when a bed is covered in large piles of clothes, so that it cannot be slept in, or a floor is covered so completely with objects that paths have to be found across the room.
Because this behavior is puzzling and can cause a great deal of pain to close family members, hoarding is usually seen as a mental illness. It certainly is when someone can’t even throw out food or garbage. However, again, there appears to be more to the story, as research is starting to look at possible causes.
Learned behavior can be a big part. Metelits says his mother grew up during the Great Depression, when it made sense to save things because they could have a later use. Some hoarders see themselves as collectors — caretakers who “rescue” valuable “antiques” or who are eager to “complete a set”.
Neurologists also see hoarding as a crude, instinctive attempt to correct a physical problem in the brain. What hoarders seem to have in common is that their brains are different from those of most people, particularly in the areas that handle decision-making and certain kinds of memory. Hoarders therefore use external aids, such as stacks of newspapers — even if they never consult them. Visible memory is also important: piling things up creates an index in the hoarder’s mind.
On the positive side, many hoarders also seem to share a sense of altruism, thinking that their “collection” might be of use to the right person someday. Judging by the Internet Archive’s gratitude, Marion Stokes was right about that part.
A reader asked, “What about the dollhouses?” I responded:
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any other direct references to the dollhouses. I think they’re covered by her son’s statement: “Whenever she bought a toy for a grandchild, she got one for herself, filling her homes with thousands.” According to this audio interview with him, she collected (accumulated) all sorts of decorative objects, filling nine separate residences and three storage locations.
