Once a year, for the past 20 years, a group of Naples locals have been showing up for the annual "Old Timers Reunion". It's an event all about the way Gulf Coast life used to be.
You can only get in if you lived through Hurricane Donna, which hit Collier County in 1960. Our Dispatches from the Swing State team happened to be driving through town during this year's reunion and brought us this dispatch, on walking to work and changing Naples.
As of the 2010 Census, barely 1% of folks in Collier County walk to their jobs. Very different from the county that Voncile Storter Tomlinson grew up in.
"Well, you walked to school, then after a while when you grew up and went to college and come back and worked, you walked to work cause it was close”, Tomlinson said. “You didn't have to, but you walked to work."
To Voncile, that small-town feel is paradise - not the high-rise condo vacation spot Naples has become.
"We would like to get back to the old way that we were", she said.
Voncile Storter Tomlinson comes from a founding family in Collier County. Both Naples and Everglades City have Storter Avenues. Voncile grew up in Naples more than seven decades ago. Back then, she says everyone in her family was a Democrat.
"However, my Uncle Claude was a Republican and we all laughed at it”, said Tomlinson. “But now, I think probably we all are."
Most of Collier County is Republican now - 52% compared to 25% Democrat. Voncile hopes the next president can restore the country, but she's less hopeful about restoring the small-town, walk-to-work society she longs for.
"Because I don't think we could ever get that back”, Tomlinson said. “But America to what the United States of America stands for: In God We Trust. One Nation Under God. It just was a way of life and we don't have it now."
Voncile says she'll be voting for Mitt Romney on November 6th.