There was a time when John and Esther were making plans to stay in the Melbourne area. They bought a building lot not far from where is now located the NASA space Center at Cape Canaveral. But things were happening, their first son Harold was born. And John? Little Marrowbone was beckoning.
John and Esther sold the lot in 1926 for just ten dollars. They were living on Little Marrowbone and of course had no input into the price offered. They knew they could not continue to pay the taxes and from all indications had no intentions to move back to Florida. Esther had two children and soon the third and last was born.
The lot was not far from where Ponce De Leon landed four hundred ten years earlier in his quest for the fountain of youth at St. Augustine. If he had waited until 1921, he could have used Esther’s youth, because it was then that she moved to another shore, not the Atlantic, but to the shore of Leander’s Lake. Esther was miles away on Little Marrowbone, so her sister Ruth handled the selling of the property. Ruth too would soon leave the family, head back to Kansas where she would play another important role in the life of Esther.
No mention was ever made, at least to the author’s knowledge, as to how John and Esther with their baby, made that trip from Melbourne, Florida to Little Marrowbone.
The Model-T Ford was the most popular family car at the time, but John and Esther were nearly broke. The highways in 1923 were hardly drivable. In fact, an Army convoy headed up by a young Army officer named Dwight Eisenhower took one hundred and sixteen days to travel thirty-three hundred miles in a coast-to-coast trip just two years before the couple left Melbourne. John and Esther probably remembered that trip for a long time.
Eisenhower surely did, when he became president in 1960, forty years after the convoy trip, Dwight spearheaded the historical making of the Interstate Highway system. John and Dwight. John, born in 1892 and Ike 1890, both served during the First World War.
Lucky for them though, they both could have had Happy Birthday sung for them; the traditional song was written in 1893 by a Kentucky kindergarten teacher and her sister. Their first lyrics were not Happy Birthday to You, instead it was a song for their little kindergarten children, Good Morning Too You. The Happy Birthday version didn’t appear until about the time Leander began scooping the muck out of his lake, in 1908.
Speaking of singing, music was a noticeable part of the Setters family, perhaps because of John. The piano from the dance hall, a player piano, was brought to the Setters house. There were rolls of perforated music that were placed inside the piano and all you had to do was pump the pedals and the keys would perform. But as is seen in this picture in their later years in a rare photo of Raymond and Harold, the Setters boys could also play instruments. Raymond also played the harmonica.
Before the first World War began, Ike was busy turning the pages in school books and John was busy raising the hoods on all kinds of cars and trucks. Both became proficient at what they were pursuing. Two months after John was born, on July 5th, 1892, the first version of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag was written. Dwight, as president, signed the bill adding “Under God” the year that John’s grandson, also named John, was born, July 2nd in 1954, sixty-two years after the original Pledge of Allegiance was written and the same number of years after his grandfather was born. Unlike his grandfather, John Setters, and Ike, John chose to do his military duty deep down in the ocean in submarines.
By the way, Ike named his son John, who pursued a fine military career.
The Setters boys, who failed to pursue music as little ones, did allow it to enter their upper years. Here you seen Jim, who began piano lessons at the age of 84 serenading his grandson’s dog, Nya, who seemed to be enjoying the treat.
See the lamp with the blue arrow? Jim still has it in his basement apartment in Longmont, Colorado where he lives with his daughter, Carol Setters, and her husband, Terry Kruger.
And, of course, his grandson James, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, nearby, still has Nya to enjoy. Nya is a bit older now, and in fact, in dog years, a lot older. And like Jim, has some white facial hair.
Nya can still bark, but Jim, has lost nearly, if not all of his piano talent. Jim lost all his early morning playing talents when he lost his early morning audience, His Dana, that early Sunday morning in May of 2020, now, two years ago.
On November 6th, he will reach the age of NINETY-FOUR, and will soon be re-united with his favorite early
morning audience. Surely, they have pianos up THERE!
Harold, after retirement from the Air Force followed his father’s talent with the fiddle, but, maybe not as well as his dad. But both, Harold and their dad, have joined Esther up THERE!