Word: kemper
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...other historians, Baxter had helped the wartime Army write its combat history. When the huge project began, the scholars were appalled to find themselves under the command of a handsome young Regular Army light-colonel, who looked 18 and was only 30. As it turned out, Colonel John Kemper handled his irregulars so adroitly that Baxter & Co. never forgot his "tact, courage, imagination and rare administrative skill...
Baxter was sure that Kemper could run Andover. At first Kemper guffawed. All he knew about Andover was that girls at nearby Abbot Academy, where his wife and his mother went, were once called "Fem-Sems" by Andover boys. For a career military man, his war had been cruelly pacific, but he had won the Legion of Merit twice and had high hopes for promotion...
Baxter kept talking, and in 1947 the peacetime Army began looking drabber. One day Kemper found himself being asked point-blank by Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson, president of the board: "What do you think you could do for Andover if you were headmaster?" Said Kemper: "Isn't the question, Bishop, what I could get others to do with me to help the school?" Team Player Kemper...
Officers & Ladies. "I never would have resigned had I known Korea was coming," says Kemper. "I loved the Army with a passion." Well he might, being descended from eleven straight Army generations going back to the Pequot Indian Wars. Kemper was born at Wyoming's Fort D. A. Russell, followed his officer-father from post to post, attending eight public schools from Texas to the Philippines...
...Father expected all of us to be officers and gentlemen," says Kemper, "which was hard for my sisters, but not for me." The colonel tried and failed to make Johnny a star athlete, but his upright New England mother made him something better. "He is a good man," says his sister Peg. "Anything cheap or second-rate has never been in his mind...