Beginning in the late 1950s, the Philadelphia Water Department began publishing a newsletter for employees that was reported, written and edited by PWD staff. The newsletter was probably created to boost staff morale and try to provide some cohesion among the hundreds of employees spread out at about a dozen locations all over the city. The 54 newsletters collected here include big-picture department news related to drinking water, sewage treatment and the pollution of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, but they also includes profiles of employees, records of new hires, promotions and retirements, reports of the accomplishments of PWD sports teams, and even announcements of the marriages of employees and births of their children. The newsletters provide a different view of PWD operations–more fine-grained and more personal–than that presented in the public facing annual reports of this era (which can be found on this page of WaterHistoryPHL.)
The collection presented below is not complete, but represents all the copies that have surfaced in my 25-plus years as the PWD historian and archivist. No newsletters were published from about 1973 until 1984, when the publication was revived and given a new name, Pipeline, which was published until 1997. If any reader had any copies of these newsletters that are not included here, I would love to hear from you.
INDEX
Creating an index of all the issues was far beyond my abilities, but I did create a pseudo-index of sorts. The attached PDFs were created from 300 to 400 dpi tif images of the pages, and the text on all the pages is searchable. For anyone that wants to search across all the issues at once, for specific keywords or employee names, you can access a composite PDF of all 54 newsletters here. Please be aware that while all the text is the same, the images in the composite were reduced in quality to make the file a manageable size (79 mb vs. more than 400 mb).