Meet Your Neighbor
Susan Bennett Witte
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER
You read about islanders who are in the public eye all the time, but what do you know about your neighbors - those you see at the supermarket, the gas station, at school or just in passing on the street? Everybody has a story about how they came to be here, what they have done and how their experiences have shaped their lives and added to the fabric of Nantucket's unique character. This week The Nantucket Independent continues a new feature highlighting island residents. Susan Bennett Witte is a thoughtful person who possesses a deep love of learning and who, through her passion for challenges and new experiences, has traveled many roads in her career life and looks forward to what the future may hold.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

Holding Buster the "schnoodle" dog with Kitty Witte the cat lounging in an adjacent room of her and her husband's rambling former beach cottage, Witte (pronouced witty) explained that she was born and raised in Watertown, Mass. where she attended grades K-12 at Mt. Trinity Academy, a private girl's school, before enrolling in Boston's St. Elizabeth Hospital School of Nursing. Earning a scholarship as campus nurse in exchange for room, board, books and tuition, she moved on to the Newton College of the Sacred Heart where she majored in biology.

Her interest in nursing drew her to Washington, D.C. in 1969 to work in intensive care and the emergency room at Georgetown Hospital, Walter Reed Army Hospital and in the emergency department of George Washington University Hospital. After that juncture, Witte was ready for a career change and was hired to sell advertising space for the Northern Virginia Sun newspaper which resulted in her 1973 recruitment by WTOP, a Washington Post/Newsweek radio station. Her job there selling air time developed successfully over the years, but as fate would have it, while convincing a real estate company to place its advertising with the station Witte was recruited again - in this instance to become one of the company's real estate agents.

She stayed with the firm until 1979 when she opened her own Susan Bennett Real Estate, Inc. Meanwhile, her future husband Phil Witte, who had been living on Nantucket since the early 1970s, was asked by the management of 21 Federal to go to Washington and run its branch restaurant there. Not long after he relocated he, too, decided to enter the real estate world and fate struck again when the couple met during a transaction where he represented a seller and she a buyer. They married six months later, honeymooning on Nantucket and vacationing here for four summers until Phil tired of urban living and they moved to the island for good in 1998.

"Phil would be a washashore. I call myself a dragashore," she joked.

Making the transition from negotiating deals on huge apartment buildings in the city to selling vacation homes on Nantucket took some adjustment for Witte, who said she had to "retool my bag of tricks." In 2001 she enrolled in Lesley University's self-guided study program and earned a bachelor's degree in holistic care. It was then that she learned the art of Jin Shin Jyustsu, a harmonizing touch technique that activates the body's natural healing process. Having kept her nursing license active through the years, Witte became more immersed in the island community by offering this healing free of charge to Hospice patients and their families as well as having a small private practice she operates from her home. Witte also volunteers in the Hospice Tapestries program for children who have experienced grief.

Coincidentally, when Witte was a Nantucket Film Festival volunteer in 2001, she saw a film called "The Laughing Club of India" that chronicled the founding of what has become a world-wide movement focused around laughter as a means to improve breathing by increasing oxygen intake.

"I was inspired by that and decided to study the scientific elements of laughter and attended a program in Ohio to become a certified laughter leader," she explained. Salt Marsh Senior Center was happy to welcome Witte's Laughing Club to its roster of beneficial elder programs, and Witte still holds the sessions there on a monthly basis, has started them on the mainland and is a member of Nantucket's Council on Aging.

Though Witte is busy with her local real estate office, she enjoys sailing, movies, entertaining and traveling and holds dreams of discovering new ways to broaden her skills.

"I like school," she said. "I'd like to go back and get another degree. I guess

I just like learning." I