Jimmy Kempe
bermudian sailor
James Wasson Kempe (28 August 1923 – April 2018) was a Bermudian sailor. He competed at the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 1960 Summer Olympics. His sons Reid and Jay Kempe competed together in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona in the Tornado class. His grandsons, Justin and Jonathan Kempe, live in Bermuda and own a yacht charter company.
Biography
In the mid-1950s, Kempe became a founding member and the first president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and helped to found the clean-up group that became Keep Bermuda Beautiful. In the early 1970s, he was a founding member of Sandys Rotary Club and president 1976–1977, he was also an honorary life member of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club.
As a teenager, he raced locally in Bermuda and overseas in the Luders 16 Class and was a member of the Bermuda Offshore Cruising Association. He represented Bermuda at three world championships — Larchmont 1983, Edinburgh 1985, and Clyde 1987.
His father, James Wasson Kempe, was a Collector of Customs, while his mother, Mabel Gertrude Kempe, a music teacher, was active in the island's suffragette movement. Kempe was the youngest of five: his sister, Eleanor McGavern, was a nurse; brother Wilbur Kempe, known as Winky, founded Bermuda Forwarders, while Bill Kempe was a World War II veteran and founding partner of the firm Appleby, Spurling and Kempe, and his sister Lois Aitchison, a Juilliard graduate, became a musician.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jimmy Kempe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.