Man of many colors
Jeanette Browning
Citizen Staff
Nestled quietly in a Riverside strip mall is a little-known and colorful treasure of the Northland — Gene’s Stained Glass Studio.
Its windows filled with examples of stained glass, since 1986 the shop has been a Riverside staple, and one of a very few custom stained glass shops in the Kansas City metro area.
Its owner, Gene Roper, never suspected a community education course he took in 1981 would have such a lasting impact on his life.
Roper was working for TWA when he took a Park Hill Community Education course in stained glass making.
“I just couldn’t put it down and I still love it today,” Roper said. He went to his instructor’s stained glass shop in Claycomo the day after his first class and bought all the tools he would need to become a stained glass professional. “It was a six-week class with four projects and I had done them all within two weeks.”
Roper said he would come home from his day job and spend hours working on stained glass projects. By the time the next stained glass course came up, Roper was his instructor’s assistant. Soon, he was helping her teach classes in her Claycomo shop and by 1983 he was teaching classes himself at the Kensington Recreation Center in Kansas City, Kan.
“It’s not hard, but it is time-consuming,” Roper said. “There is no end to what you can do with glass if you have the patience.”
By 1984, he said his wife, Darlene, told him either the stained glass had to go, or he did, so he rented a small shopfront in Kansas City, Kan., where he and his wife lived at the time, and moved his operation into it. By 1986, he was outgrowing that space and moved Gene’s Stained Glass Studio to its current location.
To help meet the demands of what had turned into a second profession for Roper, Darlene took care of the shop while Gene worked during the days at TWA and later American Airlines, until his retirement in 2003.
Today, as the longest-running stained glass shop in Kansas City, Roper stays busy with custom work and repairs. He has commissioned work in the Kansas City metro area, Arizona, Virginia and as far away as Tokyo, Japan. He completed the restoration work on the stained glass at the President Hotel in the Power and Light District and has also done restoration work at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. He also reproduces photographs into stained glass works.
He also teaches others the art. Both at his shop and through Park Hill Community Education, he offers classes for beginners all the way to an advanced Tiffany lamp class. He also teaches glass fusing and slumping, a technique of melting glass in a kiln to create jewelry and works of art. Recently, he’s started hosting birthday parties at the shop, where patrons can create their own glass jewelry to take home.
Another innovation Roper recently perfected is the announcement box, an intricate stained glass box that can display anything from a wedding invitation to a graduation announcement. Though he originally designed the boxes as gifts for his children and grandchildren, he now also offers boxes for sale to customers.
He also attends 4-5 conferences each year to learn new techniques and stay on top of the art. He even tried his hand at glass blowing, but admitted he doesn’t have the lung power for it. Instead, he brings in professional glass blowers for demonstrations at his shop.
The store also sells various glass colors and styles along with supplies, tools and gift items.
While Roper stays busy with his custom work and teaching, he doesn’t mind that many people don’t even realize his shop is there.
“I do this because I love to do it,” Roper said. “I don’t want to get overwhelmed with business because then this becomes a job, and I don’t want that.”
After seven years of working full-time on glass after his retirement, he has no plans to slow down either.
“They will have to carry me out of here,” he said. “My wife has said maybe I should sell out and we could go do something else, but when I ask her what she wants to do she doesn’t know. So I told her, when you decide, you let me know.”
Until that time, Roper said he’ll be working on his glass.
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