Joan Carlton Kemp

Joan Carlton Kemp, wife and best friend of Richard Leverette Kemp of Asheboro, and loving mother of Cheri Lynn Ferguson of Wilmington, and Mark Richard Kemp of Charlotte, died just after 5 a.m. Sunday, February 18. She was 85. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, February 24, at the First United Methodist Church of Asheboro, with the reverends Linda Ferguson and Don Haynes officiating. Memorials may be made to the First United Methodist Church of Asheboro, 224 N. Fayetteville St., Asheboro, N.C. 27203, or the Randolph-Asheboro YMCA, P.O. Box 1152, Asheboro, N.C. 27204. Mrs. Kemp was born January 21, 1933, in Carrollton, Georgia, and spent her early childhood in Carrollton and Nashville, Tennessee. Her father, the late William DeForest Carlton, worked in textile manufacturing, and her mother, the late Mary Lilla Billings Carlton, was a homemaker. The youngest of eight children – three boys and five girls -- Joan's two closest older sisters, Carolyn and Eveyln, both late Asheboro residents, performed in the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, as the Carlton Sisters. The family moved to North Carolina when Joan was eight, and she lived out most of the remainder of her life in Asheboro, graduating from Asheboro High School in 1951. It was during high school that Joan became smitten with handsome blonde classmate Richard Kemp, and the couple soon began dating. They were married in Nashville in 1953. The couple lived briefly in Belleville, Illinois, and then Waco, Texas, while Kemp served in the U.S. Air Force, then settled back home in Asheboro in 1957. Their first child, daughter Cheri, was born in 1955; son Mark came in 1960. The family spent their summers in Tennessee, Georgia or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. After Cheri and Mark graduated college and moved, respectively, to California and New York City, the Kemps would drive to see them. As their children continued moving to other parts of the country, the Kemps continued driving to visit them, and by 2005, the couple had driven through every state in the continental United States. "My friends would ask me, 'How in the world can you spend so much time cooped up in a car with your wife on the road?,'" Richard Kemp once told his son Mark, who wrote extensively of his father and family in his 2004 book Dixie Lullaby. "I said, 'Well, because I love her. She's my best friend.'" Richard Kemp will sorely miss his best friend, Joan, as will other surviving family members: Cheri and Mark; son-in-law Howard Ferguson; granddaughter Danielle Ferguson Eriksson and her husband Chris, who live in London, England; and great-grandchildren Jax and Malin Eriksson. Mrs. Kemp had a second grandson, Nathan Ferguson, who died at 24 in 2010.