American athlete and politician. A professional football quarterback with the San Diego Chargers, he spent three seasons seeing little action on five different teams until he was sold to the Buffalo Bills in 1962. Over the next eight years, Kemp was chosen to play in six AFL All Star Games. He was co-founder and President of the American Football League Players Assn. from 1965 to 1970 and named AFL Most Valuable Player in 1965.
He was a Radio and TV Commentator with Special Assignment to Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967.
Retiring from football in 1970, he moved into the political arena. First elected to the Congress of New York. he had nine terms as a Congressman. In his second career, he was running mate to Senator. Dole in 1996, and has made a bid to be on the Republican ticket for the presidential bid of 2001.
Kemp grew up in Los Angeles, one of four sons of a father who was a truck driver-turned trucking executive and a mother, a Christian Scientist, who was a social worker in the public school system. After graduating Fairfax High School he attended Occidental College where he majored in Physical Education and married cheerleader Joanne Main upon graduation in 1958.
After a stint in the army, he and Joanne produced four children, Jeff, born in 1960, Jennifer in 1963, Judith in 1966 and Jimmy in 1972. A devoted family man, he boasts 11 grandchildren.
After retiring from professional football in 1970, Kemp made his entrance into the political arena by running for Congress in Buffalo, N Y. It was a position he held for the next 18 years. Beginning his political climb, he served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1989-1992 and in 1993, became co-founder and co-director of Empower America, a public policy and advocacy organization that is dedicated to three principles: expanding freedom and democratic capitalism, promoting policies to expand economic growth and entrepreneurship for Americans and, for advancing social policies that empower individuals, not the government. By 1995 he was serving as Chairman of the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform and, when asked why he decided not to run for President in 1996 he said he “probably was not smart enough to be President.”
Known as brash and demonstrative, Kemp is a headstrong glutton for the limelight. Mercurial and a marathon talker, a born-again-Christian, he preaches to others what his mother taught him, “If you’re not happy where you are, you won’t be happy where you’re not.” In 1999 he spearheaded the organization “Habitat for Humanity,” a community effort to build 200 Habitat Homes across the state of Michigan by the end of the twentieth century.
Kemp acknowleded in January 2009 that he was in an advanced stage of cancer. He died on May 2, 2009 at his Bethesda, MD home, age 73.
Link to Wikipedia biography