Copyright AL.com
When Valerie Abbott was first elected to the Birmingham City Council in 2001, Bernard Kincaid was mayor. Since then,she’s also served during the administrations of former mayors Larry Langford and William Bell, and current Mayor Randall Woodfin, just elected to a third term. She’s not been afraid to stand up to any of them, and she complained often when she thought residents were being taken for granted. She was old-fashioned, occasionally cranky, and prone to folksy sayings. “Every pot has to sit on its own bottom,” she once said during a 2021 discussion of the city budget. “We just have to sit down and do the work.” Abbott took part in her final meeting as a council member on Oct. 21, and on Tuesday she returned to watch her successor, Josh Vasa, take the oath of office and take over the seat she held for 24 years. “I’ll miss it a lot, but you still have to know when to go,” Abbott said Tuesday, fighting back a few tears. “When I left AT&T, I was as happy as a clam. I don’t feel happy about this, but I just knew it was time.” Abbott, 73, an Auburn University graduate who worked at BellSouth/AT&T from 1974-2017, has been a widow since her husband Rod died in 2011 after they had been married 35 years. “He was my biggest supporter, my campaign manager, the person who did things behind the scenes,” she said. Abbott spent a lot of time caring for her mother, Shirley Anderton, before her death July 29, 2024, at 101. “After those five years of taking care of my mom, it just became too much,” she said. “Even though she’s gone, it was still time for me to let somebody else have some of the fun.” Abbott gave advice to Vasa that she’d also give to any newly elected government official in any city. “Attend every single meeting,” she said. “Attend all the neighborhood meetings and do what the residents want, not what the developers and the money men want, and sometimes not even what the mayor wants.” A motto at the Birmingham City Council chamber says the people are the city, and Abbott believes that. “You listen to the people,” she said. “That’s the most important thing, because the residents are the city. If you ignore your residents, pretty soon you won’t have a city, because they’ll all move to the suburbs where people care about them. People have the impression that the city of Birmingham doesn’t really give a damn about the residents. So you have to be the one that shows you’re different, if you are different. I’m intending on making sure that Josh is different.” As her City Council career ended, Abbott said she wanted to dance and travel. To that end, Abbott has been taking ballroom dancing lessons, hoping to learn the waltz and other traditional dances. “I’m hellbent on trying to keep my mind,” Abbott said. She watched her mother’s cognitive decline and doesn’t want that to happen to her. “She suffered from dementia right there at the end,” Abbott said. “She was physically in great shape, but her mind, she couldn’t remember what she had for breakfast. She wasn’t herself anymore. She was somebody else, hiding in a familiar-looking body. It was hard.” Abbott said she’s not intent on matching her mother’s longevity. “I don’t want to be 101 when I pass,” Abbott said. “I’m pretty sure I don’t. I really want to keep my mind and I don’t know whether that’s possible.”
