Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Flying Lion, and the Thompson Trophy Race That Made Cleveland the Center of the Aviation World

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy Race at Cleveland in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - the only pilot in the history of the race to win it three times. He did it flying some of the most dangerous aircraft ever built, wearing a powder-blue uniform, and occasionally arriving at airshows with a lion. The spectacle was deliberate. The flying was exceptional. Turner understood that aviation needed a public, and he spent his career building one.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Roscoe Charles Turner was born on September 29, 1895, in Corinth, Mississippi. He trained as a balloon observer with the Army Signal Corps during World War I but never deployed to France. After the armistice, he joined the wave of young veterans who took to barnstorming - hauling passengers for five dollars a head across the South and Midwest, landing in pastures and fairgrounds, sleeping under the wing when no other option existed.

He drifted west, tried running a small airline in Nevada, and eventually landed in Hollywood. Directors and producers noticed him immediately: here was a pilot who looked the part and knew how to hold a room. He began doing aerial work for the pictures.

How Roscoe Turner Built His Public Image

Somewhere in that world of manufactured glamour, Turner made a calculated decision. If the world was going to look at him, he would give them something worth looking at.

He designed a uniform - not a flight suit. Powder blue, tailored, with riding breeches, a Sam Browne belt, and a peaked officer’s cap. He grew a mustache and waxed it into twin points. The effect landed somewhere between a fighter ace and a circus ringmaster, which may have been exactly the point. He was constructing a character, and the character’s name was Roscoe Turner, Daring Aviator.

This wasn’t vanity. It was strategy. In an era when aviation was still fighting for mainstream attention, Turner understood that the airplane itself wasn’t enough. You had to give people a story.

Gilmore the Flying Lion

In 1930, Turner struck a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company of California. They wanted their brand in the air. Turner wanted money to race. Gilmore Oil’s mascot was a lion - and somewhere in the course of negotiations, Turner came home with a lion cub.

He named the cub Gilmore.

Gilmore flew with Turner on cross-country flights, fitted with a custom harness and reportedly a small parachute rig. He appeared at airshows and posed for photographs with every newspaper man who showed up with a camera. By all accounts, he was an extremely cooperative lion who seemed to enjoy the attention.

The newspapers went absolutely wild. Kids who had never thought about flying suddenly needed to get to the airport. Turner had put aviation on the front page of every paper in the country - and he’d done it with a lion.

As Gilmore grew toward full size, the cockpit flights became impractical. He eventually retired from flying and lived out his days at a care facility, reportedly in good spirits about the whole arrangement. Turner kept photographs of the lion on his office wall for the rest of his life.

What Was the Thompson Trophy Race?

The Thompson Trophy was the centerpiece of the Cleveland National Air Races, an annual week-long aviation festival that drew hundreds of thousands of spectators to Cleveland Municipal Airport through the 1930s. The Thompson was a closed-course pylon race: roughly 50 miles per lap, flown 10 times, for a total of 500 miles at maximum power.

Standing in the infield when the racers came around the near pylon, spectators felt the pressure wave before they heard the engine. That was how close the aircraft flew. That was how fast.

The aircraft competing weren’t civilian machines. The Gee Bee racers built by the Granville Brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts, were essentially giant engines wrapped in the minimum possible airframe. They were lethal. The roster of Thompson competitors from this era overlaps substantially with a roster of crashes and fatalities. These pilots were pushing machinery past what contemporary engineering could predict - and sometimes the edge found them first.

Turner’s 1934 Thompson Trophy Victory

In 1934, Turner flew a Wedell-Williams Type 44 racer, one of a series of clean monoplanes built by Jimmy Wedell in Louisiana. Where the Gee Bees were brutal and barely tamed, the Wedell-Williams machines had genuine elegance - better handling, better lines, still ferociously fast.

Turner drove that airplane around the Cleveland pylons at an average speed of 248 mph and took the 1934 Thompson Trophy. He also set a world speed record for land planes that year. The showman, it turned out, was one of the finest racing pilots of his generation.

The French Challenge That Changed Everything

In 1936, the American racing establishment received a shock they didn’t see coming. French pilot Michel Detroyat arrived at Cleveland in a Caudron C-460 - a sleek, enclosed-cockpit monoplane with retractable undercarriage that made most of the American racers look like they had been designed in a hurry. Detroyat flew at an average of 264 mph and left the entire field behind.

The American aviation press was not pleased. Turner watched Detroyat collect the Trophy and went home thinking hard about what it would take to win it back.

Building the Meteor

The answer was the Turner-Laird LTR-14, which Turner called the Meteor. He worked with designer Lawrence Brown and builder Emil Matthew “Matty” Laird on the new aircraft. The Meteor was a purposeful monoplane with fully retractable landing gear and a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Jr. engine producing approximately 900 horsepower. Building it was neither quick nor cheap, and for months it wasn’t certain the project would come together at all.

By 1938, it was ready. Turner took it to Cleveland.

He won.

He brought it back in 1939.

He won again.

Three Thompson Trophies: A Record That Still Stands

Three Thompson Trophy victories: 1934, 1938, and 1939. No other pilot in the history of that race ever won it three times. Turner was the only one.

A photograph from the 1939 race shows Turner standing next to the Meteor after the victory - in the powder-blue uniform, holding his trophy. The image captures both things at once: the showman who built a legend so carefully it became real, and the pilot who was skilled enough to make it stand up in the air.

The End of the Golden Age

The 1939 Cleveland National Air Races was the last full peacetime event in the series. The following summer, Europe was at war. The aluminum, engines, and fuel that had fed the pylon circuit had somewhere more serious to go. The golden age of air racing ended before most people had the chance to recognize it as an age at all.

What Roscoe Turner Did After the Pylons

Turner came through the war running a flight school in Indianapolis. The Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation trained military pilots - the aviators who would go on to fly the aircraft that the racers had helped develop.

After the war he stayed in Indianapolis, teaching and building the school into a respected institution. He became an elder statesman of general aviation, the kind of man whose opinion people traveled to hear. The uniform was still there. The mustache was still waxed.

Roscoe Turner died in Indianapolis on June 23, 1970, at the age of 74. He had been part of aviation in one form or another for more than half a century.

The Thompson Trophy is preserved at the Smithsonian. The Meteor survives as well. And Roscoe Turner - the Mississippi barnstormer who dressed like a general, flew with a lion, and won the most dangerous race in America three times - stands as one of the genuine originals of a genuinely original era.

There were pilots of his generation who flew higher. Pilots who went farther. Pilots who became more famous in the history books. But few worked harder to make ordinary people love aviation, or could back all of it up in the air the way Turner could. He was the showman who had the goods to match the show.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) won the Thompson Trophy in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no other pilot in the race’s history has ever matched.
His 1930 sponsorship deal with Gilmore Oil Company produced Gilmore the flying lion, one of aviation history’s most effective publicity campaigns.
Turner’s 1934 Thompson victory in a Wedell-Williams Type 44 came at an average speed of 248 mph - also a world land speed record for the year.
The Turner-Laird LTR-14 Meteor, built in direct response to a French victory at Cleveland in 1936, powered his back-to-back championships in 1938 and 1939.
Turner understood better than almost any pilot of his era that aviation needed a public - and he spent his career building one, without ever sacrificing the airmanship to back it up.