Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Lion, and the Three Thompson Trophies That Made the Golden Age's Most Outrageous Pilot Its Greatest Racer

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy closed-course pylon race in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no pilot has ever matched. He did it with no formal education, no family connections in aviation, and a talent for self-invention that turned barnstorming showmanship into something closer to mastery. When the National Air Races ended their piston-era chapter after World War II, Turner’s record went with them, preserved in amber by the end of the age that produced it.

What Was the Thompson Trophy?

The National Air Races ran from 1920 to 1949, interrupted by the war. The centerpiece of the Nationals - held in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities - was the Thompson Trophy race, named for James H. Thompson, a Cleveland businessman who put up the trophy and prize money beginning in 1930.

The Thompson was not a cross-country race or an altitude contest. It was a closed-course pylon race: a roughly five-mile circuit marked by pylons set in Ohio farmland, flown below 500 feet, with pilots required to round each pylon within 100 feet or take a penalty lap. Ten laps. Fifty miles. The whole race was over in roughly fifteen minutes.

The aircraft were purpose-built machines - tiny low-wing monoplanes with enormous engines crammed into minimal airframes. Cockpits barely fit a pilot. Cooling systems were designed to survive a race, not a long flight. Wing loading was high enough that stall speed in the pylon turns wasn’t far below minimum flying speed. Slow down at the wrong moment and the race was over. Sometimes, so was the pilot.

The danger was real and the toll was steep. Jimmy Wedell, who designed some of the fastest racers of the era, died in a crash in 1934. Roy Minor was killed at the 1936 Nationals. Frank Jarman died at the 1937 races. The Gee Bee machines became legends precisely because putting one on the pylons required nerve that bordered on recklessness. This was the most dangerous flying anyone was doing in the 1930s.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Turner was born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1895. His father farmed. Turner left school after fifth grade - about as much education as a sharecropper’s son could expect in Mississippi at the turn of the century - and spent his early years driving trucks and selling motorcycles.

When the United States entered World War I, he enlisted hoping to fly. He got balloon observation training instead, which at least got him into the air. After the war, he paid for flight lessons wherever he could find them and by his instructors’ accounts was physically rough on the airplane early on - wrestling the controls rather than flying them. He kept at it anyway.

By the mid-1920s he was barnstorming: flying passengers out of county fairs and cow pastures across the South for two or three dollars a ride. And even among barnstormers, Turner was an event.

The Uniform and the Brand

Most barnstormers of the era wore leather jackets and maybe a white scarf. Turner wore a custom-tailored uniform: a light blue wool tunic with gold braid at the cuffs and shoulders, properly cut khaki riding breeches, tall black boots, a peaked officer’s cap, and a blond mustache waxed to horizontal points.

He called himself Colonel Roscoe Turner. The colonelcy was honorary - an arrangement through the Nevada National Guard brokered via political connections - but he wore the rank as if he had earned it on the Western Front.

The uniform was calculated. Turner had grasped something that most aviation businessmen of his era hadn’t: flying was not only a technical achievement. It was a performance. The people who turned out weren’t just watching an aircraft. They were watching a story about what aviation meant. The uniform was part of that story. It said that this was a man who took the enterprise completely seriously, and that the age of flight looked like this.

The self-promotion was real. Staying alive in barnstorming required it. But underneath the theater was something genuine - Turner believed that aviation was going to change the world and that part of his job was to make other people believe it too.

Gilmore the Lion

In 1929, Turner signed a promotional contract with Gilmore Oil Company, a California gasoline brand whose corporate symbol - borrowed from the MGM studio lot - was a lion. Turner painted his airplane in Gilmore’s red and yellow and put the company’s name on the fuselage.

Then he got a lion cub.

The cub’s name was Gilmore. He weighed roughly twelve pounds when Turner acquired him. A small parachute harness was made for the photographs. For the better part of three years, Gilmore flew alongside Turner to air shows from California to the Gulf Coast. When Turner opened the cockpit and the lion stepped down onto the tarmac on his leash, the crowd response was unlike anything else barnstorming had produced.

The arrangement also enforced something useful. A frightened 150-pound lion in a small cockpit at altitude was a problem nobody wanted to discover in flight. Keeping Gilmore calm required smooth, unhurried flying - no sudden maneuvers, no unnecessary turbulence. Turner developed precise, controlled hands because the lion demanded them. That discipline stayed with him long after Gilmore retired.

When Gilmore grew too large to fly safely, around 1931, Turner retired him to a zoo in Sacramento. He visited through the 1930s. The keepers said the lion recognized him on sight until the end.

Three Thompson Trophies

Turner entered the Thompson Trophy in the early 1930s and was a contender almost immediately. He finished third in 1932 and second in 1933, learning the race and the course with each lap.

In 1934, he won it. Flying a Wedell-Williams Model 44 - a Louisiana-built racer designed by Jimmy Wedell, fitted with a supercharged Pratt & Whitney engine - Turner averaged 248 mph for the ten laps and ran away from the field.

He was 39 years old and already asking what it would take to win again.

The answer required four years. Turner commissioned Matty Laird of Chicago to build a purpose-designed Thompson racer. The result was the Laird-Turner Meteor: a tight, aerodynamically clean airframe powered by a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp producing close to 1,000 horsepower, with fully retracting landing gear and Turner’s signature light blue and gold paint scheme.

The Meteor was unforgiving. The cockpit was barely large enough. Visibility over the long nose was poor. The engine ran hot. In the tight pylon turns, the wing loading left slim margins. Turner spent months flying practice laps over test courses, dialing in the precise technique that let him push the aircraft without going past its edge.

In 1938, at age 43, he took the Meteor to Cleveland and averaged 283 mph for the ten laps. Second Thompson Trophy.

In 1939 - September 3, Cleveland Municipal Airport, crowd of roughly 100,000 - he returned and did it again. He averaged just over 280 mph for the ten laps and crossed the line first.

Three Thompson Trophies. No pilot in the history of the National Air Races ever matched that total. When the Nationals resumed after World War II, jet aircraft had replaced piston racers, and the closed-course pylon era was finished. Turner’s record was never broken because the era that produced it had simply ended.

After Racing

Turner retired from competition and opened the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he spent the rest of his working life running a flight school. The school trained thousands of pilots - military students before and during the war, civilian students through the 1940s and 1950s. The most theatrical performer in golden age aviation turned out to be one of its most committed teachers.

He received the Harmon Trophy three times - the award given annually to the world’s outstanding aviator. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and eventually a Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to aviation.

Turner died in Indianapolis in February 1970, at age 74.

By all accounts, he still walked like a colonel.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - the only pilot to win it three times, a record that still stands.
The Thompson Trophy was a closed-course pylon race averaging around 280–283 mph over 50 miles (10 laps of ~5 miles), flown below 500 feet - the most dangerous racing in 1930s aviation.
Turner’s lion, Gilmore, flew with him for roughly two years after a 1929 sponsorship deal with Gilmore Oil, and the discipline required to keep the lion calm in the cockpit sharpened Turner’s technique as a pilot.
The Laird-Turner Meteor, designed by Matty Laird and powered by a near-1,000-hp Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp, was the machine behind his 1938 and 1939 victories.
Turner spent his post-racing career running a successful flight school in Indianapolis, training thousands of pilots from the pre-war years through the 1950s.