Witten family gift of $100,000 will create scholarship for UF veterinary students

Jacksonville veterinarian Joe Witten and his wife, Sophie, have given $100,000 to the University of Florida College of Veterinary so that others will not be denied an education because of money.

The Joe and Sophie Witten Scholarship Fund will be used to support need-based scholarship awards to veterinary students attending UF. State matching funds are expected to boost the endowment by approximately 50 percent.

“When my grandfather came to America from Russia, he bought land in Jacksonville so that he could have cows,” said Maxine Funk, Witten’s daughter. “There were four brothers, and education has always been very important in our family.”

Witten, who originally came to UF as a medical student, spent one semester at school before his father had a bad accident on the farm: A bull charged him in a field.

"He came home and was here about a year and a half, running the dairy and helping my grandfather,” Funk recalled. “He found that he really enjoyed the work, and he told his father he wanted to keep on working there.”

Her grandfather, however, would hear none of it.

“He told Dad, he said, ‘I don’t mind you staying in the dairy, but you have to be educated.’ So of course, what he was telling him was that he wanted him to become a large animal veterinarian,” Funk said. Since Florida did not have a veterinary school at that time, Witten’s parents put him on a train heading for Auburn.

“My dad really had no idea where he was even going at the time,” Funk said. “He actually got off at the wrong stop, at Opa Locka, and hitchhiked the rest of the way there.”

Witten’s love for the profession and his academic gifts became even more clear when he graduated at the top of his class at Auburn in 1940.

He returned to Jacksonville, working side by side with his dad, Max Witten -- for whom Maxine is named -- and expanding the dairy, Funk said.

In addition, he performed veterinary work at 40 dairies in the Duval County area.

“My brother and my mom, they were city folks,” Funk said. “Me and my dad, well, put it this way, I’d have lived on the dairy in a minute, but we were outvoted.”

On weekends, Funk recalls traveling with her father on veterinary calls, and riding every weekend on a pony they kept at the family dairy.

“It was a seven-day-a-week deal,” Funk said. “He was always working, but he was very dedicated and he worked very hard.”

He still does; at 83 years old, Joe Witten still maintains his veterinary license.

“He’s always saying he’s never sure when he might have to go back to work,” Funk said.

The Witten family gift was motivated not just by their lifelong connection with working animals, but by a family pet who received cataract surgery at UF’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital in the mid-80s.

“The surgery went very well,” Funk said. “Dad saw that, and was very impressed not just by the way our dog, Lambchop, was cared for but also by everything that was going on around there.”