By: ARLINE A. FLEMING,
Providence Journal Staff Writer

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From the office at 13 West Main St., Hempe covered the comings and goings of the Navy, and the growth o the small town where he started his career as a URI journalism intern at the Providence Journal’s Wickford bureau. “I cleaned up the clip files for a month, and then I covered my first meeting in Exeter at the Wawaloam School,” he said.

That night, School Committee members gathered “with a jug of cider and a box of doughnuts, and talked about potato farming,” he recalled.

Hempe returned to the Wickford bureau, typed out a four-paragraph report, and sent it to Providence by way of a teletype machine. By the time it got in the next day’s paper, it was only two paragraphs, he said. No byline, of course.

This was his introduction to a career in journalism in which he accumulated a closet full of newspaper clips, the first and last ones datelined Exeter.

In between the meeting with the doughnuts and the final Exeter editorial written behind the red, Wickford office door, Hempe worked for the Providence Journal, was drafted, served in the military, including in Vietnam, returned to the Journal and covered Johnston, and eventually became bureau manager in Wickford and Wakefield.

At the time, Gerald S. Goldstein, former South County bureau manager for the Providence Journal, was editor of the Wilson Publishing Company-owned Narragansett Times.

Hempe and Goldstein had news rivalry going, which grew into the beginnings of a lifelong friendship. Hempe’s work caught the eye of Wilson Publishing owner Fred Wilson. Wilson, with Goldstein’s encouragement, offered Hempe the helm of The Standard-Times.

“I liked the idea of running my own show,” Hempe recalled. He also liked the idea of teaming up with Goldstein.

So in 1969, Hempe became editor of the Standard, and Goldstein ran the Narragansett Times news office.

“We were it,” Hempe recalled of the days of gathering the news, writing the stories, shooting the photos, writing the headlines, designing the pages, taking the obituaries, and watching the newspapers fly off the press-the editors were required to stay behind and check over the early runs.

“A big edition back then would be about 10 pages,” Hempe said, but as the area’s population grew, so did the newspapers. Eventually, they were able to hire a reporter to share, and a photographer.

“He has been the quintessential grassroots journalist, concerned with local issues that directly shape how we live our lives,” said Goldstein of Hempe.

“He’s always done his work close to the people he covers. Ever since he started in Wakefield with the journal in the early 1960’s he’s worked from an office on village main streets where readers could pop in without notice either to praise him or to shake a finger at him.” There were weeks when Hempe saw more of his typewriter than his home.

“I’d put my kids to bed on Sunday nights and not see them again until Thursday,” Hempe recalled of his early years at the Standard Times. His three children, David, Judi and Christine, are grown and he and his wife Lorraine have eight grandchildren.

Because he worked late into Tuesday nights and early Wednesday mornings for years, there were television shows Hempe said he never saw until they went into re-runs. But that was just the nature of running a weekly newspaper almost single-handedly.

While doing so over the past decades, Hempe also volunteered at a number of organizations, among them South County Museum, South County Hospital, the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, and in recent years, URI’s East Farm – where he can usually be found on good weather days.

In recent weeks, Hempe and an army of volunteers have been preparing for tomorrow’s East Farm Open House and Crab Apple Festival at URI, caring for the grounds, sprucing up Master Gardener greenhouses, and getting ready to sell the 1,5000 plants they have cultivated.

“He is the single best volunteer organizer I have ever worked with,” said Marion Gold, director of the Cooperative Extension’s education center at the Kingston campus. Gold, who does outreach for the College of the Environment and Life Sciences, works closely with the Master Gardeners, witnessing their many volunteer efforts, and Rudi, she said, “has brought in a lot of other people passionate about plants.”

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