With a jockey father and working around the family stables as a schoolboy, Jim Schrader was destined to become a horseman.
He drove his first winner in 1950 and retired with a total of 677 Metropolitan winners in Perth in a driving career that spanned a little over 30 years.
Schrader headed the Perth Driver's Premiership three times and was twice runner-up in that title.
In 1968, Jim Schrader was the nation's leading driver with 99 winners narrowly missing becoming the first Australian driver to drive 100 winners in a season.
In 1969, he was again the leading driver in Australia with 93 winners and he remains the only Western Australian reinsman to top the National Driver's List on more than one occasion. That season Schrader won with his only five drives on a seven event programme at Gloucester Park to become the first Western Australian and only second Australian to drive five winners at a metropolitan meeting.
In 1979 he became the first Western Australian based driver to drive 100 winners in a season. When it came to getting a horse across the line in a tight finish there was none better than Jim Schrader at cajoling, lifting or kidding a horse to the finish.
Schrader was a perfectionist and had a legendary reputation when it came to the assessment of his horses.
He was rarely off the mark, as bookmakers and the legions of Schrader fans of the time will attest.