Ships
- USS Nevada (BB-36) Captain from 11 June 1926 · Relieved on 20 September 1927
Clarence Selby Kempff was born in San Francisco on 31 May 1874. His father, Louis Kempff, was a naval officer who finished his career as a rear admiral, and his mother was Cornelia Reese Selby. Kempff entered the Naval Academy as a naval cadet on 19 May 1893 and graduated with the class of 1897. New graduates then spent two years at sea before receiving a commission, and he was made an ensign on 1 July 1899. In that interval he served in the battleship Oregon. At the Battle of Santiago on 3 July 1898 he had charge of one of her turrets.
He married Alice Brigham in San Francisco on 14 March 1905. On 12 June 1912 he became inspection officer at the Mare Island Navy Yard, and he was still in that post at the opening of 1913. The yard was familiar ground. His father had been its commandant in 1899 and 1900.
In the First World War the Navy took over the interned German liner Grosser Kurfürst, commissioned her at the New York Navy Yard on 4 August 1917, and gave command to Kempff, then a commander. On 1 September she was renamed Aeolus. That November she sailed from Hoboken for St. Nazaire with troops, the first of her wartime crossings. Kempff received the Navy Cross for commanding her while she carried soldiers and supplies through waters menaced by submarines and mines. By the summer of 1920 he was a captain. When his father died at Santa Barbara on 29 July 1920, Kempff was on his way home from Philadelphia.
On 8 April 1921 he took command of Galveston. Shore duty followed. From 1 June 1923 he was captain of the Norfolk Navy Yard, and he was still listed in that post at the start of 1925.
He returned to sea as a battleship captain. On 11 June 1926 he relieved David Wooster Todd in command of Nevada. The ship had been in commission since 11 March 1916, when William Sowden Sims first took her out, and she was due for a thorough rebuilding. On 27 April 1927 she entered the Norfolk Navy Yard. The reconstruction raised the elevation of her 14-inch guns, replaced the cage masts with heavy tripods, renewed the boilers, and added anti-torpedo bulges. Kempff remained captain through the early months of the yard period and was relieved on 20 September 1927. Hilary Herbert Royall assumed command on 14 January 1928 and carried Nevada through the rest of the modernization.
Flag rank came in the early 1930s. In October 1933 he was a rear admiral and commandant of the Portsmouth Navy Yard. On 19 October his daughter, Katherine Duer Kempff, christened the new submarine Cachalot as the boat went down the ways. In 1936, by then a vice admiral, he took command of the battleships of the United States Fleet, with his flag in West Virginia. Off San Pedro he received that force from William D. Leahy, who was advancing to command of the Battle Force. Kempff closed his active service as commandant of the Mare Island Navy Yard, which he held for two years, and retired in 1938.
He settled in Coronado and lived there for twenty-one years. He died at his home on 10 February 1959, at the age of eighty-four, after a long illness. Alice survived him, as did their sons Clarence Jr. and Charles, both then of San Diego, and three daughters. He was buried in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.