Roscoe Turner and the lion cub who rode shotgun in the Golden Age of air racing

Roscoe Turner was the most flamboyant pilot of aviation’s Golden Age — a self-invented “colonel” who flew cross-country with a live African lion in the cockpit, wore a custom powder-blue uniform of his own design, and backed up every bit of showmanship by winning the Thompson Trophy three times between 1934 and 1939. He was equal parts P.T. Barnum and Chuck Yeager, and every word of his story is true.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Born in 1903 in Corinth, Mississippi, Turner grew up in deep poverty. He learned to fly in the Army but washed out of formal flight training, picking up just enough stick time to launch a barnstorming career. He scraped together money for a beat-up Curtiss Jenny and began performing wing walks and loops across the South.

What set Turner apart was his understanding of marketing. While other barnstormers wore leather jackets and oil-stained dungarees, Turner had a sky-blue uniform tailored with gold braid, polished boots, a Sam Browne belt, and enough self-awarded medals to make a general blink. He waxed his mustache into perfect handlebars and started calling himself Colonel Turner — a rank he held in no military on earth.

It didn’t matter. When Roscoe Turner walked onto a flight line, every head turned.

How Did a Lion End Up in the Cockpit?

In 1930, the Gilmore Oil Company offered Turner a sponsorship deal. Their mascot was a lion, so Turner — being Turner — told them to get him one.

They provided a real African lion cub named Gilmore. Turner had a custom parachute harness and seat built for the cub, placed him in the front cockpit of his open-cockpit biplane, and flew him across the country.

Gilmore took to flying immediately. He would sit in the open cockpit with his ears pinned back in the slipstream, perfectly calm. Turner flew the lion on transcontinental speed runs, air races, and exhibition flights. They would land at dusty airfields, Turner would climb out in his theatrical uniform, then reach into the cockpit and produce a lion — and crowds went wild.

Turner even checked Gilmore into hotels. Photographs survive of him in the lobby of the Biltmore in Los Angeles, lion on a leash, bellhops struggling to maintain composure.

What Happened When the Lion Got Too Big?

Gilmore kept growing. By age one, the cub weighed over 100 pounds. During one flight, Gilmore reportedly grew restless and began chewing on the rudder cables. Turner had to swat the lion on the nose while flying at 160 miles per hour.

Eventually Gilmore outgrew the cockpit, and Turner retired the lion to a zoo. But by then, Roscoe Turner had become the most famous pilot in America not named Lindbergh.

How Good Was Roscoe Turner as a Racing Pilot?

Behind the showmanship, Turner was one of the finest racing pilots who ever lived. He won the Thompson Trophy — the Super Bowl of closed-course pylon air racing — an unprecedented three times: in 1934, 1938, and 1939.

The Thompson Trophy races were brutally dangerous. Purpose-built racers with over-stressed engines hurtled around pylons at speeds exceeding 250 mph. The slightest miscalculation meant death. Pilots were killed regularly at the pylons.

Turner’s machine for the later races was the Turner-Laird Special, powered by a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp cranked to over 1,000 horsepower in an airframe barely large enough for one person. He banked so steeply around pylons at over 280 mph that the wingtips nearly touched the ground.

In 1934, he won the Thompson at an average speed of 248 mph and set a transcontinental speed record — Los Angeles to New York in 10 hours and 2 minutes. Single engine. No pressurization. No autopilot. No GPS. Just a compass, a clock, and iron will.

His 1938 and 1939 victories were even more remarkable. The racers were faster, the competition fiercer, and Turner was in his mid-thirties — old for a sport that was killing younger men. No one had ever won the Thompson three times. After that third win, he retired from racing.

What Did Roscoe Turner Do After Racing?

Turner settled in Indianapolis and founded the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation, a respected flight school and maintenance operation. He trained pilots through World War II and became a civic leader — the showman transformed into an elder statesman of aviation.

He passed away in 1970 in Indianapolis and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Why Does Roscoe Turner Matter?

Turner embodied an era when aviation had no rulebook. There was no FAA to prohibit carrying an apex predator as a passenger. The sky was open, the limits were wherever your nerve ran out, and a big enough personality could make up the rules as he went.

More importantly, Turner understood something many in aviation still struggle with: flying is extraordinary, but you have to make people see the extraordinary. He was aviation’s greatest salesman. Nobody who ever watched Roscoe Turner climb out of an airplane with a lion on a leash forgot it — and that was exactly the point.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner was a self-taught pilot from Mississippi who became one of the most famous aviators of the 1930s through a combination of genuine skill and theatrical self-promotion.
He flew cross-country with a live African lion cub named Gilmore in the cockpit, complete with a custom parachute harness — the ultimate aviation publicity stunt.
Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, 1939), a feat no one had accomplished before, racing at speeds exceeding 280 mph in pylon courses that regularly killed pilots.
In 1934, he set a transcontinental speed record of 10 hours and 2 minutes from Los Angeles to New York in a single-engine aircraft with no modern navigation aids.
After retiring from racing, he founded a flight school in Indianapolis and trained pilots through World War II, earning a place in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Sources: Carroll Glines’ biography of Roscoe Turner; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum racing histories.