Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Flying Lion, and the Three Thompson Trophies That Made Air Racing America's Greatest Show

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times - in 1933, 1934, and 1938 - a record that has never been equaled. Flying purpose-built racers at speeds approaching 300 mph, Turner transformed competitive aviation into a national spectacle while cementing his place as the defining figure of the golden age of air racing.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Turner was born in 1895 in Carnival, Mississippi, a crossroads community in the northern part of the state that barely appeared on maps. His early years offered few advantages. School ended early. He worked as a garage mechanic and auto driver before the First World War brought him into the Army in 1917, where he served in a balloon observation unit over the Western Front.

Drifting above active artillery in a hydrogen-filled envelope while both sides attempted to shoot him down shaped Turner’s relationship to risk in ways that would define his career. When the armistice came and he returned home, he needed something that moved faster. He taught himself to fly around 1919 - not through a formal program, but by finding someone with an airplane, working a deal, and figuring it out together. He then bought a battered Curtiss Jenny and went barnstorming.

How Turner Built His Brand Before “Personal Brand” Was a Phrase

The barnstorming circuit of the early 1920s was improvised and marginal. You flew into an unfamiliar town, found a farmer with a flat pasture, paid him a dollar for the day, and charged townsfolk two dollars a ride. If the weather and crowds cooperated, you made rent and gas money. If they didn’t, you slept in the barn alongside the airplane.

Turner was watching even while he was flying. He noticed which names the country remembered and which ones it forgot. By the mid-1920s he had made a deliberate decision: he was going to be a star, not just a capable pilot.

He started by designing his own uniform from scratch. Baby blue, because it photographed beautifully in black-and-white newspaper photography and because nothing else on any ramp in America looked like it. Gold braid on the cap because it said authority without being military. Riding boots polished to a mirror finish. And eventually a waxed handlebar mustache curled at the tips in a style borrowed from cavalry posters of the 1880s - entirely deliberate. Turner was telling you, from the moment you laid eyes on him, that this man is not like anyone else you have ever met.

He wasn’t wrong.

By the late 1920s, Turner was flying wealthy passengers transcontinentally, setting speed records, and appearing in papers from San Francisco to New York. That visibility attracted Gilmore Oil.

Gilmore the Flying Lion

Gilmore Oil was a California petroleum company whose brand symbol was a red lion on every pump and billboard from the Sierras to the Nevada border. One of their marketing men proposed a simple idea: put a real lion in an airplane with a famous pilot, and every newspaper in the country would run the picture without a nickel spent on advertising. They were right.

Turner took the deal in 1930. Gilmore the lion cub flew for the first time that year, wearing a custom-fitted miniature parachute harness - impractical for an actual lion, perfectly designed for photographers. The image of Turner climbing out of a cockpit in his powder-blue uniform with a lion on a leash stopped newspaper readers cold.

Over the years they flew together, Gilmore logged more than 26,000 miles of air travel, apparently meeting altitude with complete equanimity. Witnesses described the cat watching the ground pass below with an air of total indifference, as if this was simply what lions did. Eventually Gilmore grew to approximately 350 pounds, at which point the partnership presented both logistical and structural challenges. Turner arranged for Gilmore to retire with dignity to a zoo in Seattle, where the lion spent the rest of his days in good health.

What Was the Thompson Trophy Race?

The Thompson Trophy was the centerpiece event of the National Air Races, held annually in Cleveland during the 1930s. Named for Ohio businessman Charles Thompson, who provided the funding and the trophy itself, it was a closed-course pylon race. Pilots flew laps around a ten-mile course marked by pylons, as low as they dared and as fast as their engines would pull them. The rules were simple: fly the course, don’t cut a pylon, win.

The National Air Races during this era were arguably the greatest sporting spectacle in America. One hundred thousand people regularly lined the fence at Cleveland’s lakefront on Labor Day weekend. Late 1920s winners were averaging around 200 mph. By the early 1930s, that number was climbing past 250 mph as aircraft designers and pilots pushed the technology harder each season.

Turner’s First Two Trophies: 1933 and 1934

Turner flew Wedell-Williams racers in 1933 and 1934. Jimmy Wedell was a Louisiana pilot and self-taught designer who built airplanes by instinct and feel. His machines looked fast sitting still on the ramp - every part of the airframe appearing to know exactly what it was for.

At Cleveland in 1933, Turner crossed the finish line at 248 mph. He won again in 1934 - back-to-back Thompson Trophies, something no pilot had ever done.

Then Jimmy Wedell died in a training accident in Louisiana in 1935. He was 40 years old. The racing world shifted after that. Different machines, different configurations. Turner flew for a few more seasons without a win as younger pilots came up fast and hungry.

The LTR-14 Meteor: Building a Purpose-Built Champion

By the time Turner went to Laird Aircraft in Chicago to commission a dedicated racer, he was in his early forties - an age the racing world was treating as a verdict on his competitive future. He decided the verdict was wrong.

The project became the LTR-14, known most often as the Meteor or the Turner Special. It was a mid-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear and lines clean enough to appear drawn by someone who had never touched a straight edge. Painted white with red trim. The engine was a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior - 18 cylinders in two rows, producing approximately 1,000 horsepower in race trim. The three-blade propeller was adjusted and re-adjusted in the weeks before Cleveland to extract every fraction of efficiency from the airflow.

The cockpit was brutal by all accounts. Small, hot, and loud in a way that stopped being sound and became physical sensation. The G-forces through pylon turns pushed the pilot continuously down into the seat. It was not a comfortable airplane. It was a winning airplane - which is a different thing entirely.

The 1938 Thompson Trophy: Three and Done

Turner brought the Meteor to Cleveland in 1938 for a 20-lap, 200-mile race. The field included strong competition: Art Chester in a machine called the Jeep, a compact aircraft with a massive engine whose handling other pilots described with words suggesting equal parts respect and concern.

Turner took the lead early and held it. That’s the simple version. The fuller version is 200 miles of absolute-effort flying - lap after lap pulling hard through pylon turns, watching a hundred thousand spectators blur below the wing, listening to the engine for any change in tone that might mean something was coming apart, holding altitude as low as the rules and nerves would allow because every foot of altitude was speed surrendered back to the course.

He crossed the finish line at an average speed of 283 mph.

He was 43 years old. He was crying when they cut the engine. He climbed out onto the wing while the crowd made a sound like weather.

Three Thompson Trophies. No one before him had won three. No one since has matched it.

After the Races: Turner as a Wartime Flight Instructor

The National Air Races suspended operations in 1940 as war approached. Turner opened a flying school in Indianapolis. During the Second World War he trained thousands of military pilots, translating two decades of racing experience into the skills those pilots would carry to Europe and the Pacific. The unglamorous work that unglamorous work requires.

Turner died in 1970 in Indianapolis at age 74. The Meteor is preserved at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio - worth standing in front of for a while if you find yourself there.

Why Turner Still Matters to Aviation

What gets missed when people talk about the golden age of air racing is that the showmanship and the flying were never separate things. The uniform, Gilmore, the carefully constructed public image - all of it was Turner telling people that what they were about to watch genuinely mattered. Then he got in the airplane and proved it was true every time.

Turner understood something essential: aviation needed a public, and a public needed a reason to show up. He gave them one, repeatedly, at 248 mph and then 283 mph, until there was no one left to argue with him.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1933, 1934, and 1938 - a record that has never been equaled before or since.
His lion cub co-pilot, Gilmore, logged over 26,000 miles of air travel wearing a custom miniature parachute harness, generating national press coverage for years.
His 1938 win in the purpose-built LTR-14 Meteor came at an average speed of 283 mph over 200 miles of closed-course racing - at age 43.
Turner’s deliberate image-building - uniform, lion, mustache - was calculated strategy rooted in a clear understanding that aviation needed public attention to survive and grow.
After racing, Turner trained thousands of U.S. military pilots during World War II, passing on knowledge earned through two decades at the edge of what aircraft could do.