Tina Weintraub, 89, top aide for 3 Phila. mayors

Tina Varanini Weintraub, 89, a deputy managing director for three Philadelphia mayors, died of dementia and arterial fibrillation Wednesday, July 13, at Cathedral Village, the Roxborough retirement community where she had lived since May 2010.

She had resided in Lafayette Hill since 1980 and, before that, in East Mount Airy.

Her husband, Herbert, said Mayor Joseph Clark was the first, in 1952, to name Mrs. Weintraub a deputy managing director, "which was pretty unusual."

Mayors Richardson Dilworth and James H.J. Tate reappointed her to the job.

A 1970 Philadelphia Daily News report stated that she "is the administrative workhorse of the managing director's office," and since 1952 "the highest-ranking woman in the city government."

Among her more visible accomplishments, stated a 1955 news release, "she developed the program of enlisting and training women as part-time traffic guards at school intersections, thus relieving patrolmen for regular police work."

In May 1971, the board of trustees of Philadelphia General Hospital named her its executive director.

"Mrs. Weintraub's selection marks the first time that a woman or someone who was neither a physician nor a hospital director has held the job," The Inquirer reported at the time.

She did not appear to be a stranger to the hospital since, the story noted, she was the deputy managing director "in charge of the 10 service departments in the city, including the health department and PGH."

In 1975, her husband said, "she had a serious heart attack . . . and had to retire in 1976 because her health was bad."

When she recovered, her husband said, she worked as a volunteer for the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia, and was chair of its board of trustees from 1984 to 1987.

Born in Sacramento, Calif., she graduated in 1939 from C.K. McClatchy High School there and earned a bachelor's degree cum laude in 1943 at Stanford University, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

"While a senior at Stanford," the 1955 news release stated, she helped set up "the university's European Area and Language School for the Army Training Program and became assistant to the director of the school."

She met her future husband at that school. The couple wed soon afterward.

After working for the War Food Administration in Washington, she earned a master's degree in political science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 1944.

In Philadelphia from 1944 to 1952, Mrs. Weintraub was a senior analyst at the Bureau of Municipal Research, which, her husband said, was an independent agency.

The 1955 news release stated that while with the agency, "her pamphlet, The Authority in Pennsylvania, Pro and Con, won the 1949 award of the Governmental Research Association for the year's outstanding research study."

Besides her husband of 67 years, Mrs. Weintraub is survived by daughter, Wendy Levin, and a grandson.

A private funeral was held Friday, July 15.