Buck's Florida Lies Among The Back Roads

By STEVE OTTO The Tampa Tribune

Published: Apr 27, 2008

With his son Fred at the wheel of the big Buick, Buck Setzer leaned back. "We'll be taking the back roads," he said. "It might take a little longer but I want to show you some things."

That was OK with me. I was sitting in the back seat with Stockton Smith, who has his own share of growing-up-in-Tampa stories. I was in no hurry.

Of course, calling Dale Mabry Highway a back road was a little bit of a stretch. It didn't get any back-roadier when we pulled onto U.S. 41 and continued through Lutz and Land O' Lakes either, which seemed to come as something of a surprise to Buck.

I'd showed up at Buck's house in Beach Park earlier in the morning. It's one of those homes most people would like to have when they think of gracious living in Florida. On a canal, surrounded by mossy oaks, it has a view out onto the Bay. Yeah, sure, maybe if I keep buying lottery tickets.

But then Buck earned it, after decades of meandering Florida in the lumber business.

John "Buck" Setzer is 93. He and his wife, Alice, are still vigorous, life-loving people who have a feel for this part of Florida.

A Different Florida

He came to the Bay area at the age of one month from Jacksonville. "Daddy had found a job in Plant City but we didn't have a place to live and we eventually moved to Tampa. We had a small house off of West Shore Boulevard, which was not really a boulevard and barely a road."

In fact, about the only life around there were the critters of the swamps and palmetto scrub. "We ran trap lines and I hunted for rabbits and possums. We were never hungry."

I asked him if he'd had any dealings with gators and mentioned the story last week about that alligator that wandered into the woman's kitchen over in East Lake Woodlands. By now we were driving on U.S. 41 near Masaryktown, but the development that stretched out of Tampa continued along both sides of the road.

See You Later

"We used to come out here when we were boys to go camping and hunting," he said. "We would go out on the lake at night in a small boat. I remember there were three of us and one had an old .22 rifle. The idea was to shoot the gator in the back of the head.

"They were easy to see in the dark. You shined a light in the water and their eyes would look back at you like red coals. The first one we shot and hauled into the boat had to be 8 feet and he took up most of the inside. Later on, we hauled two smaller gators aboard and started to head to shore.

"That's when all three gators that we thought were dead began to thrash around. I didn't really want to jump into the water where the gators had friends, and fortunately all three of them decided to slide overboard themselves and disappear."

There were more stories but we had come to Dunnellon and the back road to his daughter's house on the Rainbow River. The Rainbow is not technically a river but a 6-mile flow from deep springs to the Withlacoochee River. Taking his pontoon boat we floated down the crystal-clear flow, past otters and great birds, along a piece of Florida first inhabited by the Timucuan Indians thousands of years ago.

We were in Buck's Florida and I hated to go back hours later, but at least I had a full catch of stories.

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