With the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series heading to Kansas City, Kan., this weekend for Sunday’s running of the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway, the circuit travels to the home state of its first ever winner, Jim Roper. Roper won a race at the three-quarter-mile Charlotte Speedway, a dirt track, in 1949 to claim victory in the first race of the series that is now known as the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. He was awarded $2,000 for the win. Roper didn’t get to keep the trophy, though. It, reportedly, was kept by his car owner.
Glenn Dunnaway actually took the checkered flag ahead of the Millard Clothier-owned car Roper was driving, but Dunnaway was disqualified when his car was determined to have been “modified.” Roper actually finished three laps behind Dunnaway, who was driving a car that owner Hubert Westmoreland had shored up the chassis on by spreading the rear sprints -- a no-no, even in the earliest days of NASCAR. Roper grew up on a horse farm in Halstead, Kan. In his younger days, his sport was basketball, but that interest turned to stock car racing when his grandfather gave him a 1930 Chevrolet from his dealership. Roper would later tell a reporter of that first race car, “I raced that thing seven nights a week, even in the middle of winer, on a figure-eight dirt track, the kind you pass in the middle both ways. I could get that Chevy up to speeds of 60 to 70 miles per hour.” The post-World War II era of the 1940s saw Roper racing midgets, as well as several other types of race cars, throughout the Midwest prior to that first NASCAR race, a race Roper had learned about from reading a comic strip in his local newspaper. Aside from that first race at Charlotte, Roper drove in one other NASCAR-sanctioned event in 1949 -- a 200-lap race at Occoneechee Speedway, also in North Carolina. He finished 15th in that race. That was the third race of the series, and despite only making two starts, Roper finished 16th in points that year. Roper disappeared from the NASCAR landscape about as quickly as he appeared, as those two races in 1949 were the only two Roper competed in. But his racing days weren’t over. He did continue to race in his home state of Kansas and the surrounding area a few more years until he sustained a broken back in a crash during a sprint car race in Iowa. He continued to be a presence in local racing throughout the Midwest after that back injury ended his driving career. He spent a short time working as the flagman at a local Kansas track and spent several years building race cars for other drivers. Roper died in 2000 from liver and heart failure after a lengthy battle with cancer. He may not have been behind he wheel of a race car for long and his career in NASCAR may have been very brief, but he’s still a Kansan to be remembered as NASCAR’s top series -- one that Roper competed in himself on a couple of occasions -- heads to his home state. Roper may not have been in NASCAR long, but he’ll always be the first-ever winner in the series that was to later become the ultimate in American stock car racing -- the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Because of that, Roper will always be a part of NASCAR history. Amanda Vincent is a feature writer for SpeedWeekly magazine and SpeedWeekly.net
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