People

Cam-do spirit

A middle-aged homemaker fought for a cause in 1979 and has never looked back.

By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 11, 2003

SEFFNER -- When Leo Oberting met his future wife at a local dance more than 50 years ago, he quickly learned the 17-year-old's tiny frame was misleading.

Camelia, "Cami" to her family and "Cam" to everyone else, was not even 5 feet tall and weighed maybe 90 pounds soaking wet.

But boy, was she feisty.

"She's just a fighter," marveled Leo. "Always has been."

But Cam Oberting's role as one of Hillsborough County's most fearless activists came late in life, after she bore five children and cooked them countless meals in the Seffner home she keeps white glove-neat.

"Even at 17, I knew what I wanted in life," said Oberting, 71. "I wanted to have a family and a long marriage."

She got both.

Cam and Leo will celebrate their 54th anniversary in June, and they are eagerly awaiting the birth of their 11th grandchild.

The walls and shelves of Oberting's home are covered in family pictures dating back decades. In the kitchen hangs a framed poem that 49-year-old son Victor gave her for Mother's Day three years ago. "I am, at heart, a homemaker," she said.

But 24 years ago, an unwelcome notice from her neighbor, the Taylor Road Landfill, prompted Oberting to go into town for a battle with government leaders and the landfill's operators.

Her fight against the landfill's proposed expansion -- and the contaminants it leaked into the area's drinking supply -- transformed Oberting from "just a housewife," as she puts it, into a blunt community watchdog whose exclamations of "Oh, darlin'!" and "Honey!" belie her aggressive determination.

Developers, government officials, fellow activists. Oberting has taken them on, sometimes emerging victorious and sometimes not.

But always with unflagging passion.

Currently, she's fighting a proposed 39-acre borrow pit, which would become the latest of several already dug in the area.

In the past two decades, Oberting has worked to prevent sprawl in Thonotosassa and litter in Seffner.

Today, she serves on several committees and boards, among them the county's Citizens Environmental Advisory Committee, the Thonotosassa land use planning committee, Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful and the Florida Consumer Action Network.

The fax machine in her bedroom is always spewing paper, and Leo doesn't answer the phone because he knows it's probably for Cam anyway.

"I don't need all this," she said. "But I do it because I believe in justice and fair play."

Oberting's passion was recognized in 1992, when she became the first winner of the county's annual Moral Courage Award. The honor was established to recognize residents who stand up to government to improve their community.

"Cam, over the years, consistently does her homework on the issues," said County Commissioner Jan Platt, who created the award. "Some of those issues are very controversial, and yet she does not hesitate to stand up and speak her mind. She's like a little dynamite."

Keep it green

Oberting grew up in West Tampa, one of three children born to a Spanish family with roots in the cigar factories of Ybor City and West Tampa. Her grandfathers were cigarmakers, her mother was a homemaker, her father was a prizefighter.

She remembers stripping tobacco leaves as a child, and to this day is repulsed by the smell of tobacco.

Oberting attended Jefferson High in Tampa. At 17, she met Leo at a dance and fell in love with the handsome, green-eyed engineer from Indiana. They married before she graduated.

"I have never regretted it," she said. "He was a Yankee, I was a Southern belle, but it worked. You know, I still get chills when I hear our song, Green Eyes."

Green is Oberting's favorite color; various shades of it blanket her living and dining rooms -- a design scheme that pays tribute to the untouched outdoors she fights to protect.

Oberting picked the dark green rug, the sage curtains, the huge wallpaper mural of towering trees, because "this is what Florida should look like."

When she and Leo built their home off Sligh Avenue in 1968, they never dreamed the landfill would take root a quarter-mile away.

Mention the landfill and Oberting shakes her head in disgust: "Oh, no, honey. That's not a happy story."

The 42-acre Taylor Road Landfill opened in 1976 off Taylor Road north of Interstate 4, over a porous section of the Floridan Aquifer, Florida's primary source of drinking water.

Three years later, a proposal to expand the landfill caught Oberting's attention.

"Before that, I couldn't even tell you who my commissioner was," Oberting said.

The 64-acre expansion, known as the Hillsborough Heights Landfill, happened despite Oberting's efforts. But she formed the Taylor Road Civic Association, of which she remains president, and used it to urge an investigation that found the landfill was contaminating the area's drinking water.

County officials operated the dump until 1980. In 1981, the EPA declared the dump a Superfund site. The landfill's expansion site, 64-acre Hillsborough Heights, closed in 1984.

"It was a lot of time and effort, but it's worth it, because you know you're doing good," Oberting said.

Still, when she has a few rare moments, she goes to the shaded swing and garden in her front yard, far away from the fax machine and the phone.

"This is where I should relax," she said just as her portable telephone rang. "But who has time?"

CAM OBERTING

CLAIM TO FAME: Creating the Taylor Road Civic Association, which urged the investigation and eventual closure of the Taylor Road Landfill, which was leaking contaminants into her neighborhood's drinking water.

AGE: 71.

FAMILY: Married to Leo, 82, for 54 years; five children, 11 grandchildren; a German shepherd named Blitz von Oberting; and dozens of cows, geese and ducks that roam the 11-acre property she and Leo moved to 35 years ago.

UNLICENSED, UNAPOLOGETIC: Oberting has never learned to drive a car. "But I can drive a tractor better than any man!"

WORKING OVERTIME: She says she cleans her house in the middle of the night because she runs out of hours in the day.