This is the highest award given by the Society of 140,000 members. In 1986, Kemp received the Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, the University of Illinois Civil and Environmental Engineering Alumni Association. The Society for Industrial Archeology awarded Kemp the 1993 SIA General Tools Award for Distinguished Service to Industrial Archeology. Kemp had an award created in his honor, by the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia, an organization which he is a co-founder of. The award is the Dr. Emory Kemp Lifetime Achievement Award. Emory Leland Kemp was born in Chicago on Thursday, October 1, 1931 at 4:10 p.m. in Jackson Park (Chicago) Hospital. In between the building and another building where Dr. Kemp lived at age four, was a large play area, and there was an apartment down a big flight of concrete stairs and "I’m not sure how I did this, but I succeeded in backing my tricycle down these stairs. And, I was picked up by one of the neighbors, it was—and I still remember this—and he came out the back stairs of our apartment, knocked on the door, and my mother opened the door, and he said, 'I don’t think he’ll live.' That was that and I’m still here!" "In October of 1935 I had been going, first of all to the Christian Science Church for Sunday school—not because my mother was at all interested in Christian scientists, uh, message, but because they would take very small children in Sunday School. Uh, at age ten in 1941, uh—having gone to the Methodist Sunday School—I decided to become a Methodist, and in a sense took vows of never to be involved in alcohol, tobacco, and to become a Methodist, which I have been throughout the rest of my life." Kemp became an Eagle Scout with three palms. While Kemp was working with Colonel Hudson in the Army, "I’m not sure how he did it, but my whole company was sent to Korea, except for me, and I got a special order." Emory was requested to go to the Engineer Research and Development Center in Alexandria, Virginia, "so I fought the Korean War in Washington. I have really nice memories of that." There, he took an advanced mathematics courses and structural engineering courses. "The only thing I remember which was, um, quite memorable, on guard duty we had to have fixed bayonets, and if you could stand there with a bayonet under your chin, if you nodded off you stabbed yourself, so it kept you awake.