They won the annual Caldecott Medal for The Big Snow (1948), recognizing the year's "most distinguished American picture book for children".
The family moved 100 km to the east, to the resort town of Parras, Mexico, when Berta was three, then soon-after to Amarillo, Texas, where her father ran a grocery store.
Berta, perhaps inspired by her mother's colorful sketches of Mexican life, took art classes and read extensively while still in elementary school, winning literary and artistic prizes for her work.
In the fall she moved to San Francisco, took over Eva Shepard's fashion illustration work, and attended the California School of Design, where she studied from 1915 to 1918.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army and returned to France in 1918 as a member of the Camouflage Corps, just at the time that Berta was asked by Ms. Beatty to come to New York to work in fashion design illustration at McCalls.
Seeking a more rustic setting, they left the city to rent the Lyall Cottage in Grand View-on-Hudson, a small town in rural Rockland County, New York on the west bank of the Hudson River.
The two used their talents and Berta's connections to prepare children's sections for Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Pictorial Review, Asia, Century, and The Christian Science Monitor.
In Berta and Elmer Hader's Picture Book of Mother Goose, the couple collated pen-and-ink and color drawings they had done for Monitor and Good Housekeeping to great acclaim.
When the US Postal Service dis-allowed the sending of magazines with cut-out segments in 1926, the Haders switched gears, gaining a contract with MacMillan for a series of children's books.
In the early 1950s, Berta became a community activist, ignited by the seemingly lost cause of having the location of the proposed Tappan Zee Bridge moved to a less sensitive area than its planned path through her village.
Amongst other research, the Kemps gained information through correspondence with several friends of the Haders, such as J. J. Marquis, Jane Terrill Barrow, Ruth and Latrobe Carroll, and Doris Patee.