Marion Stokes died in December 2012, but the full story of her life took almost a year to come out.<\/p>\n
According to<\/a> her obituary<\/span> in The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/i>, Stokes was a librarian<\/span> 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<\/span>. She was married three times and was twice divorced.<\/p>\n That was it. That was her life \u2014 except for one sentence in the article: “She also enjoyed watching cable news shows and collecting dollhouses<\/span>.”<\/p>\n Often there is a story behind the story, and this was it. Eleven months later, an online magazine called Fast Company<\/i> published its own article<\/a> about Stokes \u2014 focusing on that one sentence.<\/p>\n Stokes, you see, had collected the news like nobody’s business<\/span>. When 24-hour cable news started in the early 1980s, she recorded all the programs, using as many as eight VCRs<\/span>. According to Fast Company<\/i>,<\/p>\n “She’d feed<\/span> a six-hour tape into the recorders late at night. She’d wake up early the next day to change them (or conscript<\/span> family members to do the same if she wasn’t home). She’d cut short<\/span> meals at restaurants to rush home before tapes ended. And when she got too old to keep up<\/span>, she trained a younger helper named Frank to run the various recording equipment.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The tapes were never used more than once; they just piled up<\/span> as new ones were put in. After 35 years, Stokes left behind 140,000 videocassettes; they filled several apartments and an external storage unit<\/span>. The tapes had cost her more than half a million dollars. It would take a person 342 years to watch all of them.<\/p>\n Stokes’s son, Michael Metelits, said his mother “was possessed<\/span> … by a belief that the miles of news footage<\/span> would someday, some way, prove useful to somebody.” He has donated<\/span> the tapes to the Internet Archive<\/a>, an online library that plans to digitize<\/span> them and make them available to the public. But there is more, wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/i>, when it later revisited the story<\/a>:<\/p>\n “[Metelits has] recovered<\/span> about 50,000 books, most wearing halos<\/span> of yellow sticky notes<\/span> on which Stokes had scribbled<\/span> a thought or comment. She kept enormous boxes of newspapers, most unsalvageable<\/span>, and huge runs<\/span> 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.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Perhaps it was Stokes’s training as a librarian that enabled<\/span> her to label everything and keep it more or less organized; but still, her compulsive<\/span> behavior governed her life. Less disciplined individuals who try this sort of thing often become hoarders.<\/p>\n Note that “hoarding” is the proper term; the German word Messie-Syndrom<\/i> is fake pseudo-English.<\/p>\n Psychologists say hoarding may be suspected<\/span> when so many things accumulate<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n Because this behavior is puzzling<\/span> and can cause a great deal of pain<\/a> to close family members, hoarding is usually seen as a mental illness<\/span>. 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.<\/p>\n Learned behavior can be a big part. Metelits says his mother grew up during the Great Depression<\/span>, when it made sense to save things because they could have a later use. Some hoarders see themselves as collectors \u2014 caretakers<\/span> who “rescue” valuable “antiques” or who are eager to<\/span> “complete a set”. <\/p>\n Neurologists also see hoarding as a crude<\/span>, instinctive attempt to correct a physical problem in the brain. What hoarders seem to have in common is that their brains are different<\/a> 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<\/span> of newspapers \u2014 even if they never consult them. Visible memory is also important: piling things up creates an index<\/span> in the hoarder’s mind. <\/p>\n 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<\/span> the Internet Archive’s gratitude<\/span>, Marion Stokes was right about that part.<\/p>\n A reader asked<\/b>, “What about the dollhouses?” I responded:<\/p>\n 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<\/a> with him, she collected (accumulated) all sorts of decorative objects, filling nine separate residences and three storage locations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[51,33,188],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1535,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions\/1535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}She collected the news<\/h2>\n
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But why?<\/h2>\n
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