Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Lion, and the Powder-Blue Showman Who Won the Thompson Trophy Three Times at Cleveland

Colonel Roscoe Turner is the only pilot in history to win the Thompson Trophy three times, taking the closed-course pylon racing crown in 1934, 1938, and 1939 at the National Air Races in Cleveland. He was equally famous for his powder-blue uniform, waxed mustache, and his flying companion Gilmore, a pet lion who rode along in the cockpit. Behind the showmanship was one of the finest stick-and-rudder pilots America ever produced.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Roscoe Turner was born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1895. He came up the hard way, drove an ambulance in World War I, caught the flying bug, and made his living as a barnstormer.

Somewhere along the way, Turner grasped something most pilots never do: flying was a show. People didn’t just want to see an airplane - they wanted to see a character. So he built one.

He designed his own uniform: a powder-blue tunic, whipcord riding breeches, mirror-polished boots, and a diamond-studded set of wings on his chest, all topped by a mustache you could hang a hat on. He gave himself the title of Colonel, which the state of California and a good many years eventually made more or less official.

The serious engineering types rolled their eyes and called him a showboat. Then they watched him fly, and the laughing stopped.

The Thompson Trophy: Air Racing With the Gloves Off

Every Labor Day weekend during the Depression, roughly 100,000 people packed a field in Cleveland, Ohio, for the National Air Races. The main event was the Thompson Trophy.

The Thompson was a closed-course pylon race - not a cross-country dash, but a knife fight. Pilots flew low, sometimes down around two to three hundred feet off the ground, and dragged their airplanes around the pylons as tight as they dared. Whoever averaged the fastest speed over the course took the trophy and the cash.

It was brutal, physical flying. The air near the ground churned off the summer heat, hard turns squeezed the blood from a pilot’s head, and racers flew wingtip to wingtip. It was loud, it was dangerous, and men died doing it.

Gilmore the Lion: Aviation’s Most Famous Copilot

Racing airplanes eats cash, so Turner went looking for a sponsor and found the Gilmore Oil Company on the West Coast. Gilmore’s brand was a red lion - their fuel was the Red Lion line.

Being Roscoe, he had an idea no sensible person would have. He got a lion cub, named him Gilmore after the oil company, and raised him like a copilot.

Gilmore flew with Turner all over the country, riding along at altitude and looking out at the clouds. Turner even had a parachute made for the lion, the story goes, because aviation authorities objected to a passenger without one.

Gilmore grew from a lap cat into 400 pounds of celebrity before retiring from flying to live out his days in comfort. While he flew, though, that lion put Turner’s name in every newspaper in America. When Gilmore died, Turner had him preserved, and today he resides in the care of the Smithsonian, part of the national story of American flight.

The Airplanes: Wedell-Williams and the Laird-Turner Meteor

In the early 1930s, Turner acquired a Wedell-Williams racer, the work of Louisiana designer Jimmy Wedell, who built screaming-fast airplanes largely by eye and feel. The Wedell-Williams Model 44 was a low-wing, radial-engined bullet - for a few years, about the fastest thing with a propeller in North America.

Turner won his first Thompson Trophy in 1934, averaging nearly 250 miles per hour around the pylons in the rough summer air.

He didn’t win them all - racing humbles everyone. In 1933, a scoring dispute in the cross-country Bendix race cost him dearly. So Turner commissioned an airplane built to his own ideas: the Laird-Turner racer, sometimes called the Meteor. It wore different names on the cowl depending on the season’s sponsor, but underneath it was a big, beefy, powerful low-wing racer wrapped around a thundering radial - heavier than the sleek competition, but strong enough to take the punishment of the pylons.

How Roscoe Turner Won the Thompson Trophy Three Times

In 1938, Turner won the Thompson Trophy again, averaging better than 280 miles per hour - four years after his first win, in a completely different airplane, against a new crop of hungry young racers.

Then in 1939, he did it one more time, winning the Thompson for the third time and becoming the only man ever to win it three times. Nobody has matched the feat before or since. He took that final win at age 44, when most racers had long since quit or been killed trying.

Then Turner did the smartest thing a race pilot can do: he quit, walking away at the top with the trophy in hand and all his pieces still attached, having watched too many friends taken by the pylons.

What Happened to Roscoe Turner After Racing?

When World War II arrived, the great national air races of that generation faded into history - but Turner wasn’t done with aviation. He built an aviation business in Indianapolis, ran a flying school, and trained pilots. He became an elder statesman of American flight, still wearing that mustache and telling stories, until he passed away in 1970.

His deeper legacy was an idea the slide-rule crowd sometimes missed: aviation had to capture the public’s heart or it would never win the public’s support. Every kid who saw that powder-blue uniform and that lion and grew up wanting to fly was a future pilot, mechanic, or engineer. The showman was building the future of flight one grandstand at a time.

Key Takeaways

Colonel Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) is the only pilot ever to win the Thompson Trophy three times: 1934, 1938, and 1939.
He won his final title at age 44 and retired immediately, at the peak of his career.
His pet lion Gilmore, sponsored by the Gilmore Oil Company, flew with him and is now preserved at the Smithsonian.
Turner raced the Wedell-Williams Model 44 (1934 win) and later his own Laird-Turner “Meteor” (1938 and 1939 wins), reaching average race speeds above 280 mph.
Beyond racing, he built an aviation business and flying school in Indianapolis and championed the idea that showmanship draws the public to aviation.