Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Flying Lion, and the Three Thompson Trophies Nobody Expected the Showman to Win

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - the only pilot in the history of the race to claim it three times. He accomplished this while wearing a self-designed sky blue uniform, maintaining a Gilmore Oil Company sponsorship, and spending a portion of his career flying cross-country with a lion cub in the cockpit. Turner understood what many of his technically brilliant contemporaries did not: that aviation’s future depended on its public image as much as its performance numbers.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi. He showed an early gift for machinery and mechanics, the kind of restless technical curiosity that produces either engineers or racing pilots. He served in World War I not as a pilot but as an ambulance driver in France - an experience that gave him a certain ease with controlled chaos at speed.

After the war, he scraped together enough for flying lessons and discovered quickly that he was gifted. By the early 1920s he was barnstorming across the South and Midwest, and it was there that his particular genius took shape.

How Did Turner Build His Image as a Pilot?

Barnstorming taught Turner that aviation was theater as much as technique. County fair crowds came to see something that defied belief, and Turner understood instinctively how to deliver that moment. He also grasped, years ahead of nearly anyone in aviation, the power of personal branding.

He designed his own uniform: a sky blue jacket, stiff-peaked cap, riding boots, jodhpurs, and gold braid on the shoulders. It had no connection to any actual military service, but in 1927 Turner secured an honorary commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Nevada National Guard, which gave him legal standing to wear something resembling one. He wore it everywhere - to cocktail parties, to congressional hearings, on newspaper front pages.

For millions of Americans who would never come closer to an airplane than a magazine photograph, Turner became the face of what a pilot was supposed to look like.

Who Was Gilmore the Flying Lion?

Around 1930, Turner signed a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company of California, whose corporate logo was a red lion. Someone at the company had the idea to present Turner with an actual lion cub to personify the brand. Turner said yes.

The cub’s name was Gilmore. Turner had a tiny leather harness and a properly fitted parachute made for the lion, then flew him coast to coast - Gilmore riding beside him in the cockpit, paws up on the rail, watching the American landscape scroll past at altitude. On landing, Turner would snap the leash to Gilmore’s harness, step out in his blue uniform, and walk across the tarmac with a full-grown lion at his side.

The newsreel cameras and newspapers could not get enough of it. Gilmore flew with Turner for nearly two years before the lion’s growing size made the arrangement aerodynamically and practically impractical. Turner found him a good home, but Gilmore had done his job: Roscoe Turner was now famous.

What Was the Thompson Trophy Race?

The Cleveland National Air Races were the Super Bowl of American aviation in the 1930s, and the Thompson Trophy was its crown jewel: a closed-course pylon race flown at full throttle, as low as pilots dared, around a circuit defined by tall pylons.

The turns were tight and the margins almost nonexistent. Men died at Cleveland. Prop wash from competitors sometimes flattened the grass on the inside of the turns. The competing aircraft were purpose-built for nothing else - fragile, stripped-down machines that demanded a specific discipline. Pylon racing meant carrying maximum speed through turns, keeping the nose loaded into the pylon, and judging the inside edge without crossing it. Cross a pylon and you earned a penalty lap. Miss one entirely and you were disqualified.

It was an unforgiving discipline, and it produced the fastest speeds in American aviation outside of military testing.

How Did Turner Win His First Thompson Trophy?

Turner flew his early Thompson campaigns using aircraft from the Wedell-Williams Air Service out of Patterson, Louisiana. The firm’s designer, Jimmy Wedell - a man who could barely see out of one eye and who built airplanes by instinct as much as engineering - produced some of the cleanest and fastest racers of the era.

In 1933, Turner flew the Bendix Trophy, the transcontinental dash from Los Angeles to Cleveland that served as the opening act of race week, crossing the continent in just under twelve hours to take the win. Then in 1934, he won the Thompson Trophy outright, averaging 248 miles per hour around the course. The man with the lion and the gold braid was also, undeniably, the fastest pilot at Cleveland.

What Was the Turner-Laird LTR-14 Meteor?

By his late thirties, Turner recognized that he needed an aircraft designed specifically around his style of racing: fast enough to win, but reliable enough to run across multiple seasons without being destroyed in the process. He went to designer Lawrence Brown with that precise brief. What Brown and Matty Laird produced was the Turner-Laird LTR-14, which Turner named the Meteor.

The Meteor was a low-wing monoplane powered by a Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp Junior - not the most exotic powerplant available, but one Turner trusted to hold together through hard turns on the back half of a pylon course. The airframe was engineered down to the last rivet for minimal drag, and critically, it was designed to be flown rather than merely aimed.

Turner spent months familiarizing himself with the Meteor before he ever pointed its nose at a competition course. His preflights were legendarily thorough. He knew every quirk the airplane had before he raced it, the way a musician knows a good instrument.

How Did Turner Win Three Thompson Trophies?

The 1938 Thompson Trophy ran on September 5 at Cleveland. Turner had been away from the front ranks of competitive racing for two years while the Meteor was built and refined, and many assumed he was finished as a force in the sport. He was 42 years old.

He flew the race of his life. Turner averaged just over 283 miles per hour around the course - at low altitude, in a machine where a single mechanical failure meant wreckage in seconds. He held his line from the green flag to the checkered and won his second Thompson Trophy. The press was practically speechless.

He came back in 1939 and did it again. The 1939 Thompson was the last great Cleveland air race before World War II transformed everything. Turner flew the Meteor to another first-place finish, with his average speed fractionally under his 1938 mark, and became the only pilot in Thompson Trophy history to win three times.

The span those victories covered - 1934 to 1939 - was arguably the most compressed period of technical change in aviation history. Aircraft that were cutting-edge in 1934 were obsolete by 1939. Engines, airframes, and aerodynamic understanding were all moving at a pace that made yesterday’s champion look like last century’s design. Turner kept winning anyway.

What Did Roscoe Turner Do After Racing?

Turner retired from racing after the 1939 Thompson at age 43. With the war approaching, men who understood airplanes were needed for something other than flying in circles at Cleveland.

He spent the war years as a flight instructor, passing what he knew to a generation of pilots who would fly over Europe and the Pacific. After the war, he settled in Indianapolis and operated Turner Aviation Corporation, a flight school and fixed-base operation he ran for years. He trained thousands of pilots and, by all accounts, never quite gave up the uniform.

Turner died in June 1970, a few weeks before he would have turned 75.

Why Does Roscoe Turner Still Matter?

Turner understood something the more technically-minded pilots of his era sometimes missed. The public’s love of aviation was fragile, and it needed feeding. Every kid who saw a lion sitting on the wing of an airplane at a county fair, every family that watched that sky-blue uniform stride across a newsreel screen, was a potential advocate - a future passenger, a future pilot.

He was not racing only for trophies. He was racing to make aviation real and vivid for a country that was still deciding whether the sky belonged to them.

Key Takeaways

• Roscoe Turner is the only pilot to win the Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, 1939), a span that crossed the fastest-moving five years in aviation technology
• He built one of aviation’s first deliberate personal brands, designing his own uniform and securing a legal commission to wear it publicly
• Gilmore the lion flew with Turner for nearly two years, becoming one of the most effective public relations moments in early aviation
• The Turner-Laird LTR-14 Meteor was designed explicitly for multi-season reliability alongside raw speed - a philosophy that paid off in two consecutive Thompson wins
• Turner spent his postwar years training the next generation of pilots, bringing the same long view of aviation’s future that had defined his racing career