Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Lion, and the Thompson Trophy Pilot Who Made Air Racing America's Favorite Spectator Sport

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy closed-course pylon race in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no competitor matched for a generation. He did it dressed in a self-designed sky-blue uniform with gold braid, often having arrived at the airfield with a lion in the cockpit. He was, by nearly any measure, the most famous American pilot of the 1930s who wasn’t Charles Lindbergh.

From Mississippi Farm Boy to Balloon Observer

Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi, the son of a farmer. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk when he was eight years old. By the time he was twenty-two, the First World War had given him a way into the air.

He served as a balloon observer - working the tethered observation balloons both sides used to direct artillery fire. It was not glamorous and not particularly safe; enemy fighters knew exactly where those balloons were and targeted them. But it gave Turner his first extended time aloft, and that was enough.

He learned to fly properly after the Armistice. Then he did what nearly every skilled pilot without steady income did in those years: he went barnstorming.

How the Barnstorming Era Shaped American Aviation

After the war, the federal government sold off thousands of surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” training biplanes. You could buy one for $500 - sometimes less. Young men who had learned to fly in the war bought them up, flew over county fairgrounds and open pastures, and charged a dollar or two for a back-seat ride.

For millions of Americans, this was the first airplane they had ever seen in the air with their own eyes. No television. No continuous image stream. A biplane appearing over the tree line was an event. The whole town came out.

The barnstormers were carrying aviation to every corner of the country that no scheduled airline would ever reach. They were the grassroots evangelists of powered flight.

Roscoe Turner’s Approach to Showmanship

Turner understood what most barnstormers missed: aviation in the 1920s was not just a technology. It was a spectacle, and spectacles required showmanship.

Most barnstormers were pilots who happened to perform. Turner was a performer who happened to pilot. The distinction seems small. It is not small.

He designed his own uniform: sky-blue coat, gold braid on the shoulders, jodhpur trousers, a Sam Browne belt with a polished brass buckle, knee-high riding boots, and a waxed mustache curled precisely at the tips. He held no military commission. He designed the uniform anyway, and wore it with the kind of calm confidence that makes crowds stop asking questions.

He was also, underneath all the theater, an extraordinarily gifted natural aviator.

Gilmore the Flying Lion

Around 1930, Turner entered a sponsorship arrangement with the Gilmore Oil Company, a California petroleum company whose brand mascot was a lion. The company provided him with a lion cub. The cub’s name was Gilmore, and Roscoe Turner flew him in the airplane.

Turner had a custom canvas harness made to keep Gilmore secured without obstructing the controls. He worked with California health authorities to obtain a state-issued health certificate so the animal could legally cross state lines. The photographs from this period - Gilmore in the cockpit, a miniature set of goggles pushed up on his face, peering over the cowling - became some of the most reproduced aviation images of the decade.

Every airfield Turner landed at, newspaper photographers were waiting. Children across the country knew the name Gilmore the Flying Lion. When Gilmore grew too large to fly safely, Turner retired him to a Los Angeles zoo and visited regularly. The image was already fixed in the national imagination.

The National Air Races and the Thompson Trophy

The National Air Races - held in Cleveland and Los Angeles through the 1930s - combined the cultural weight of the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Kentucky Derby, flown at speeds that bent the world around them. The Bendix Trophy went to cross-country speed. The Thompson Trophy went to closed-course pylon racing: aircraft at absolute full throttle and low altitude, spectators close enough to read the race numbers on the wings.

It was enormously dangerous. Pilots died at the National Air Races. The crowds knew it and came back the following year. The pilots understood the machine and the odds and chose the race anyway. The crowd honored that choice by showing up.

Turner flew the Thompson multiple times through the decade, initially in Wedell-Williams racers - purpose-built competition aircraft designed by Jimmy Wedell, himself one of the era’s great pilots. Then, in the mid-1930s, he began working on something better.

The Turner-Laird Meteor

The Turner-Laird Meteor (designated RT-14) was the product of a collaboration between Turner, Lawrence Brown, and aircraft designer Matty Laird. It was a single-seat, low-wing monoplane of breathtaking aerodynamic cleanliness: a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior engine turning a carefully selected constant-speed propeller, with a cowling sculpted to manage airflow with obsessive precision.

People who knew Turner in the hangar described a completely different man from the showman at the grandstand railing. Quiet. Focused. Patient. He and his mechanics went over every inch of the Meteor between races - adjusting cowl flaps, optimizing propeller pitch settings, hunting for fractions of a second in an airplane that was already very fast.

Three Thompson Trophy Wins

Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1934. He returned and won it again in 1938. He won it a third time in 1939, at the age of 43 - an age at which most closed-course racing pilots of the era had either retired or were no longer available to discuss the question.

Three Thompson Trophies. No one else had managed it. No one else would match it for a generation.

After the Races: Flight School and Legacy

The Second World War ended the National Air Races in 1940. Turner, in his mid-forties and past drafting age, opened a flight school in Indianapolis, Indiana. Hundreds of students moved through his operation during the war years. The showman in the blue uniform turned out to be a gifted teacher who understood that learning to fly is partly technical and partly psychological.

He lived to see everything change - jet engines, pressurized cabins, transatlantic airline service, the Space Race. He died in June 1970, 74 years old, having watched the world he helped build become something vast and almost unrecognizable from the days of Jennies and county fairgrounds and a lion named Gilmore.

What stayed the same was the physical reaction. Take a child to an airshow today. Watch their face when a warbird comes over the flight line fast and low. You feel a supercharged engine at a hundred feet in your sternum, in the back of your teeth. That is the same reaction the farmers and shopkeepers felt in a pasture in Indiana in 1922, watching a barnstormer pull a loop over the tree line.

Roscoe Turner dedicated his life to protecting that connection - to making sure aviation wasn’t something that happened above the ordinary American, out of sight and out of reach, but something that landed in your town, climbed out with a lion, raised a white-gloved hand, and let you feel the exhaust on your face.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) remains the only pilot to win the Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, 1939), the last win at age 43.
His self-designed sky-blue uniform was a deliberate branding strategy - he held no actual military commission but understood the psychology of authority and spectacle.
Gilmore the lion, sponsored by Gilmore Oil Company, flew as Turner’s co-pilot beginning around 1930 and made Turner nationally famous before his racing career peaked.
The Turner-Laird Meteor RT-14, built with Lawrence Brown and Matty Laird, was a precision racing machine that Turner maintained with the systematic patience of a craftsman.
The barnstorming era - of which Turner was the defining figure - was the moment aviation decided it belonged to everybody, not just the wealthy or the military.

Sources: National Air and Space Museum archives; Henry Holden’s histories of the National Air Races; the Cleveland Plain Dealer.