Fiercely Independent

Ada Rosenson Dorfeld

1947 was a year of promise and wonder. The last battles of World War II a distant echo, veterans were returning to a UF campus that had just officially become coed. For one spirited 16-year-old New Jersey girl, it marked the beginning of what would be a remarkable life.

That year, Ada Rosenson Dorfeld (BAE ’52, MED ’55), the daughter of a self-made hardware store owner, was dreaming of what might be. Florida had caught her eye: the sunshine, orange groves, palm trees, and the beaches.

“My grandparents knew they didn’t want to be in the snow and the cold the rest of their lives, so they moved most of the family down to Miami,” daughter Cindy Dorfeld Bruckman (BA ’84) explains. “Mom stayed behind in New Jersey to finish high school and worked really hard to make her own way to get into college and to pay for it.”

When the time came to leave for college, Dorfeld headed to the University of Florida—in no small part because a woman whose children she babysat had said how much her own brother loved Gainesville.

To make ends meet, Dorfeld worked at a bakery near campus—one of her jobs was squirting jelly into doughnuts. For extra cash, she sold her student football tickets. Even her spare time wasn’t free time. When not listening to lectures, studying or knuckle deep in sweets, Dorfeld represented Mallory Hall as its student housing president.

“She was just scraping by,” Bruckman says. “She’s always been a woman who’s taken nothing from anyone and was proud of the things she did on her own.”

Ada at her graduation from UF

Two degrees and a career, a marriage and motherhood, and decades of frugality and smart investing later, Dorfeld is doing her best now to make sure future educators have a smoother path to, and through, UF than she did.

Her $1 million pledge to UF’s College of Education supports the college’s overarching mission and funds scholarships for first-generation students who want to be teachers. The contribution adds to an endowment she created in 2013 to support the Bernie and Chris Machen Florida Opportunity Scholars program, which will receive additional funding through a charitable gift annuity. In recognition of her kindness, plans are being made to name the courtyard at the College of Education’s Norman Hall in her honor.

“Ada is a very loving person. She really cares about kids who are underprivileged,” younger sister Bunny Rosenberg (BAE ’60) says. “She wants to give back to the University of Florida because the university did a lot for her, and it was time to give back.”

That’s all true, Bruckman says of her mother. But Dorfeld is something else, too, she adds: “fiercely independent.”

“She’s a pistol,” Bruckman quips. “She’s going to do what she wants to do, and what she wants to do is leave a legacy. Her whole life was about teaching, getting kids to learn how to read.”

She was good at it, gifted and passionate. So much so that as an intern she taught at UF’s P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School. That was back when P.K. Yonge was still in Norman Hall. When she later moved to South Florida—and met her husband, Howard, in a Miami Beach dance hall—Dorfeld got her first “real” teaching job at Highland Park Elementary. In time, a new house in another part of town brought with it a new teaching opportunity, this one at nearby Cutler Ridge Elementary. She also tutored struggling upper-grade students and in the evening taught classes in English as a Second Language.

Ada with her daughter, Cindy, and husband, Howard

It was there, in South Florida, she learned to invest and save on a teacher’s salary. Over time, her and Howard’s portfolio of stocks, bonds and properties—started with a few dollars—grew … and grew … and grew some more.

“I remember as a kid driving around with my parents, and my dad would point to a big tall building and say, ‘You see that building over there? Your mom and I own 1/20th of that building,’” Bruckman recalls. “My mom is still a gambler in the stock market. I’ve told her she needs to pull back from her riskier stocks, but she won’t. She says, ‘Nope, I’m letting it ride.’”

Dorfeld’s health has declined in recent years, and with it, the independence she cherished all her life. Her grit, however, is strong as ever, her daughter insists. Ever the teacher, she is determined to leave a meaningful lesson for others to lean on.

“Without a doubt, education changes lives,” Dorfeld said a few months ago when her gift was announced. “Scholarships open the door for people to go farther and achieve what they never thought possible.”

Bruckman says there’s another reason her mom supports UF: the university changed her life. Oftentimes, when Bruckman makes the trip from her home in Gainesville, where she’s a librarian, to visit her mom in Pembroke Pines, Dorfeld will ask for a new Gator T-shirt.

“She’s not into sports,” Bruckman explains. “But there’s something psychological. The shirt represents her adulthood and coming of age and doing her own thing despite getting no help from anybody. It’s where she became somebody other than one of six kids fighting for food at the dinner table. She felt like she was an independent woman—which at the time women really didn’t do.”

For information, or to donate to the Dorfeld scholarship fund, click here.