Marriage and Family
Kemp graduated from Occidental in 1957 and married Joanne Main, his college sweetheart, after she graduated from Occidental in 1958. Main had grown up in Fillmore, California, and attended Fillmore High School in Ventura County. Her father was a teacher and football coach in the Fillmore Unified School District before becoming vice principal and eventually superintendent of the district. Kemp's Biblical Literature professor, Keith Beebe, presided over the wedding, after which Kemp converted to his wife's Presbyterian faith. Jack Kemp was a 33rd degree Freemason in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction.
They had two sons, who were both professional football quarterbacks: Jeff Kemp played in the NFL from 1981 to 1991, and Jimmy Kemp played in the CFL from 1994 to 2002. Significantly for a man with his demanding schedule, Jack never missed one of their games as children or in college. They also had two daughters: Jennifer Kemp Andrews and Judith Kemp. Joanne once suffered a miscarriage, which Kemp later said made him re-evaluate the sanctity of human life and affirmed his opposition to abortion. Kemp is survived by his wife of fifty years, his four children and 17 grandchildren.
Read more about this topic: Jack Kemp
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and, marriage and/or family:
“Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Do not let your bachelor ways crystallize so that you can’t soften them when you come to have a wife and a family of your own.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)