Dale Roper owned a school bus that delivered kids to Fair Grove High School. Sometimes he filled in as a driver. That was more than 50 years ago and Rick Sharp, one of the students catching a ride, remembers it well.
It was cool being chauffeured by a local legend who drove race cars on weekends. Fair Grove was a racing community and the Ropers — Dale and brother Dean, along with Dean’s son Tony — were local heroes.
“Just about everything Dale did in life had something to do with racing,” said Sharp, noting Roper even had a neat nickname during his time as a rural mail carrier — The Flying Postman.
A local legend
While he didn’t race nationally or take his racing as seriously as Dean and Tony, Dale Roper won plenty over the years. He captured seven track championships on Ozarks ovals while racing from 1965 until 2009. Just as important, he mentored countless young drivers along the way.
The Ozarks lost one of its popular racing icons recently as Dale Roper died on Sept. 28 at the age of 86. A member of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame and Springfield Area Sports Hall of Fame, Roper also was a founding member of the Ozarks Area Racers Foundation and Hall of Fame.
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When you think of racing in southwest Missouri, you think about the Roper family. Dean Roper died of an apparent aneurysm while racing in Springfield, Ill., at the age of 62 in 2001. Tony died as a result of injuries in a NASCAR Truck Series race just 10 months earlier and they joined Dale in the Springfield Area Sports Hall of Fame and Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, along with Dale’s son Dale “Pee Wee” Roper Jr., also an accomplished racer on the local scene.
Health issue cut career short
During an interview for a Springfield News-Leader story in 2014, just a few months after he nearly died from a vascular issue, Roper said he won about 200 races in his career while racing in five different decades.
Roper once said he would have still been racing, approaching his 80th birthday, if not for having his left leg amputated above the knee as a result of the vascular illness.
“It's been quite an ordeal,” Roper said at the time. “But I've been in the hospital a lot and in rehab and I've seen people in a lot worse shape than I am, and a lot younger than me.
“I have a lot of people who've helped me. I'm thankful for them.”
Always willing to help other racers
Sharp said Roper always was willing to help his fellow racers, especially when it came to offering advice on chassis set-up.
“He wasn’t a real good mechanic, but he understood things really well,” Sharp said. “A lot of people sought him out to get their car to handle, because he understood how it worked and he could explain it in a way they could understand.
“Plus, Dale figured it was easier to pass a guy if they could run the same line rather than being all over the track.”
Roper raced with the best
Roper remained active in attending races, both locally and at the NASCAR level, using a motorized wheelchair to crisscross the pit area, until his health declined in the last couple of years. It was a common sight for a crowd to form around Dale in the pits before the races as he would tell stories, a cigarette in hand.
He raced with drivers like Carl Edwards, Clint Bowyer and Jamie McMurray on Missouri short tracks before they went on to NASCAR fame and fortune.
Sharp, one of Roper’s best friends, said Bowyer simply called Roper ‘Hero.’
“I was with Dale the night he went to race at Moberly,” Sharp said. “The winner was Carl, Dale was second and Bowyer was third. That was before they had even gotten close to going to (NASCAR) Cup.”
Well-known outside the Ozarks
Sharp and Kevin Fletcher, another close friend, said Roper was revered when they accompanied him to NASCAR races at Daytona or other venues.
“Dale was pretty impressive in knowing everyone from Daytona to the little bull rings of Iowa,” Fletcher said. “ “He seemed to know them all. I remember walking down the Daytona pit road and Dale arguing with the ‘King’ Richard Petty, on just who was the oldest.
“Dale was the kind of guy that was your friend and he offered advice and usually it was spot on. I remember him picking drivers like people do horses. He would say so and so will be in the top three, just watch. Nine times out of 10, he was right.”
Edwards, who’s been reclusive since his sudden retirement from NASCAR in 2017, had immense respect for Roper. He traveled from his Columbia home last week to pay his respects to the family at Roper’s memorial service.
“Probably the thing I remember most, he said he started his racing with damn near nothing and years later he looked around and still had most of it,” Fletcher said. “Dale was truly one of the legends in auto racing and the legends are fading fast.”
