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Our World: Drive, she said
DAVID ALBERS / Daily News
Our world: Drive, she said.
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Bob Smith sputters out of his Old Naples driveway in his 1962 MGA roadster with his companion of 34 years, a camel named Camille.
In the twilight of this late-February day, he glides by the pier, waving to beachgoers as Camille watches the scenery go by, her golden curls, fake mink stole and pearls rustling in the wind.
Jaws drop. People stare. And smile and laugh. Smith plays to the crowd, angling Camille (a costume camel head mounted to a box that’s balanced on a swivel chair) to take in her admirers and the sights.
“I go out with Camille most every day,” says Smith, who has been trolling Third Street and Fifth Avenue with Camille since 1974. Smith is a 68-year-old canvas maker from Greenfield, Ind., near Indianapolis. He winters in Naples four months of the year.
“Most of them say ‘Oh! She’s beautiful!’ and I always tell them, ‘Well, we deserve each other. I can’t do no better and neither can she.’ ”
Ask anyone around Old Naples and they probably will know who you are talking about. It’s just that they won’t know much else about it.
“Yeah, I’ve seen him when he’s driving around,” says Kim Nykoluk, an employee at the pier’s concession stand. “He’s funny. The complete head moves on that thing. Have you seen it?”
Smith has an identical twin version of Camille in a MG convertible that he drives back home.
“Every now and then, I am driving down the street up in Indianapolis and somebody yells ‘Hey, we see you in Naples!’ and down here I’m on 41 and somebody says ‘We see you up in Indianapolis!’ About a month ago, I was up here at a filling station on 41 and someone said ‘We heard about you in England.’ ” Smith says, his bright blue eyes beaming through his gold-rimmed bifocals.
And somehow, people even know Camille’s name.
“They say ‘Where’s Camille at?’ and I say ‘Ah, she went to a party. She’s a real party animal.’ This is my standard line ’cause she is an animal,” he says. “That’s always good for a laugh.”
Smith also takes to the streets a few days before Halloween in his 1955 Willys Jeep, which is decorated with a casket, snakes and severed heads. Up north, he has a 1974 Volkswagen Thing he decorates in a similarly gruesome motif in October. At Christmas, Camille’s spot in the convertible is replaced with a red-nosed reindeer.
“I was driving down 41 a couple years ago and an older couple, probably 80-something years old, pulled up next to me in the car at a stoplight and said ‘We just want to thank you. Yesterday, we were out in our yard and we were feeling down. You really made us feel good,’ ” Smith says. “It makes me feel good when I can go out and make someone laugh.”
As the daylight disappears behind the Gulf of Mexico, the pair pulls under the carport of his winter home. He’s packing up to head north. “I get here about three or four days before Halloween. All I got in my suitcase is severed arms and legs.”
E-mail David Albers at dnalbers@naplesnews.com
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