Water Department Newsletters, 1959-1997

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).

September 1959
December 1959
February 1960
March 1960
May 1960
June 1960
August 1960
Sept.-Oct. 1960
November 1960
December 1960
February 1961
April-May 1961
June-July 1961
Sept.-Oct. 1961
Nov.-Dec. 1961
February-March 1962
May-Aug 1962
July 1963
Jan.-Feb. 1964
Nov.-Dec. 1964
September 1965
Spring 1972
Spring 1973
Winter 1984
Winter 1984-1985
Summer 1985
Summer 1986
Winter 1986
Summer 1987
Winter 1987
Spring 1988
Summer 1988
Winter 1989
February 1990
July 1990
October 1993
January 1994
June 1994
October 1994
November 1994
December 1994
January 1995
March 1995
May 1995
July 1995
August 1995
December 1995
July 1996
August 1996
November 1996
December 1996
January 1997
March 1997
April 1997

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