Aulia Ann Keith

A celebration of life is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 19, at University Baptist Church, 160 Shoshone Drive, Montevallo, Alabama. Visitation will start at 2 p.m., with the service at 3 p.m.

Ms. Keith was born October 17, 1936, at home in Palmerdale, in northern Jefferson County, Alabama, to Castle Keith, a farmer who later worked for 32 years for the U.S. Postal Service, and Blanche Ozell Tucker Keith, a homemaker.

She is survived by her daughter, Susan Michelle Keith of New York City, a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; her son-in-law, John Samuel Oudens, an editor at Law360.com, who was her caretaker in Montevallo for 11 months; her grandchild, Genevieve Isabelle Keith Oudens, a student at Hunter College High School in New York City; and a cousin, June Kendrick of Oneonta.

As a child, Ms. Keith lived in Palmerdale and briefly in El Paso, Texas, and in the Robinwood neighborhood of Jefferson County while her father served in the European theater in World War II. After the war, the family lived in Tarrant, Alabama, and the Huffman section of Birmingham. Ms. Keith moved to Montevallo in 1978.

She was a 1955 graduate of Tarrant High School, where the Wildcat yearbook named her “Friendliest” girl in the senior class. In high school, she loved studying Latin and developed a lifelong passion for the history of the Roman Empire. She attended classes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, took a class at the University of Montevallo, and also studied antique appraising.

She worked briefly as a bank teller and for Liberty National Life Insurance. She spent more than 20 years working at the Social Security Administration’s Birmingham Program Center, retiring as a claims authorizer in 1987 after a workplace injury.

Ms. Keith was a member of University Baptist Church in Montevallo. She frequently visited the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in New York City, where she was baptized in 2007, the same day as her grandchild and her son-in-law.

As a child, Ms. Keith loved attending Birmingham Barons games at Rickwood Field with her parents, a passion that was noted in a 2014 New York Times article about the team and its ballparks by her son-in-law. “The same people came night after night,” she told the Times, “and sat in the same place, and became kind of like a family.” Her mother, an accomplished seamstress, accommodated Ms. Keith’s desire to lean over the railings at Rickwood and beg players for autographs. “She made me sundresses with matching bloomers,” she recalled, “because I was always leaning over.” View the 2014 NY Times article at: https://tinyurl.com/4euuzwdm

After retiring, Ms. Keith became an Atlanta Braves fan and missed televised baseball games only when she was very sick or traveling. Though she attended only a few games at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and Turner Field, she saw the Braves play the Arizona Diamondbacks during the National League Championship Series in 2001 in Phoenix and play the New York Mets at Citi Field. Even after she became ill, she took delight in following the team on television and radio. She was thrilled by Atlanta’s 2023 start, 65-36 after the last game she listened to, a July 28 win over the Milwaukee Brewers.

Ms. Keith was a passionate traveler who enjoyed car rides, European train trips and the sort of bumpy plane flights that turn most people’s stomachs. Until the 1980s, she had few chances to travel beyond short trips to Panama City Beach, Florida, or the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Then, with her family and alone, she embraced international travel, visiting Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Portugal and Iceland. Highlights of her travels were a solo Eurail trip in 1989 and seeing, in 2016, Hadrian’s Wall, the northern border of the Roman Empire, which she had learned about in high school Latin classes.

Ms. Keith was also a doting “Nonnie.” After the birth of her only grandchild in New York City, Ms. Keith flew so often out of Birmingham to the Northeast that she was well known to the longterm-parking van drivers at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. She also hosted Genevieve in Montevallo during school breaks, running what they sometimes called “Camp Non-Gen.” Earlier in her life, she was a caretaker for older members of her family, looking after her mother, father, an aunt and her grandmother at the ends of their lives.

Ms. Keith had an extraordinarily independent spirit despite dealing, for much of her life, with a debilitating disability and frequent pain. She traveled even when doing so meant using a walker or a wheelchair. She endured the COVID-19 pandemic largely on her own, successfully avoiding the virus.

She was a voracious reader, frequently polishing off multiple books in a week. Books were often the topics of her daily phone chats with her daughter, Susan, who will miss those calls very much.

Donations in Ms. Keith's memory can be made to University Baptist Church, https://www.ubcmontevallo.org/ourstory via https://www.ubcmontevallo.org/giving; to Parnell Memorial Library, 277 Park Drive, Montevallo, AL 35115 via check; or to your favorite charity.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.rockcofuneralmontevallo.com for the Keith family.