Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Lion, and the Three Thompson Trophies That Nobody Has Ever Matched

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy Race three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no pilot in the history of the race has ever equaled. He did it flying purpose-built racing aircraft at speeds that exceeded the era’s most advanced commercial airliners by nearly 80 miles per hour, at fifty feet above the ground, around a pylon course above Ohio. Before and between those victories, he barnstormed the country with a full-grown African lion named Gilmore riding in the cockpit beside him, making him the most recognizable figure in American aviation during the 1930s.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Roscoe Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi. When World War I arrived, he lied about his age to enlist, drove ambulances in France, worked his way into observation balloon crews, and came home with enough flying hours and enough ambition to know exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

He entered barnstorming in the early 1920s - the precarious business of buying or borrowing a Curtiss Jenny, posting hand-lettered signs on telephone poles outside small towns, and charging locals three or four dollars for their first airplane ride. The airplane burned oil. The margins were thin in every direction. A bad engine on a hot day with a heavy passenger could end everything. Hundreds of men and a handful of women did it anyway, because they loved flying enough to live like hobos for the privilege.

Turner did it too. But he watched the game more carefully than most of his contemporaries, and he reached a conclusion they never did: aviation was still miraculous, and if it was theater - which in those years it absolutely was - then the pilot was the actor, and the actor needed a costume.

How Turner Constructed His Public Image

He grew the mustache first. Long, dark, and waxed at the ends into horizontal points that extended an inch past his face on each side. Then came the uniform: powder-blue, chosen specifically because it photographed well. Gold braid on the shoulders, wings on the chest, polished boots. He had obtained an honorary commission as Lieutenant Colonel in the Nevada National Guard, and he wore those insignia everywhere - every ramp, every air show, every newspaper photograph.

Regular military officers found this irritating. Turner did not find their irritation interesting. He signed autographs and moved to the next camera.

In 1930, Gilmore Oil Company approached him with a sponsorship deal: fly the country as the face of Gilmore gasoline, promote the brand at air shows and events from coast to coast, and Gilmore would fund his operations - including his racing. It was one of the first genuine aviation sponsorships in American history, and it worked because Turner understood exactly what sponsors needed: visibility, photographs, and someone the public would remember.

Gilmore the Lion: America’s Most Famous Co-Pilot

Somebody - the historical record is genuinely unclear on whose idea it was - suggested adding a lion to the act.

Gilmore the lion was six weeks old when Turner first brought him into a cockpit. The cub settled in without distress, apparently indifferent to the vibration, the noise, and the altitude - as young animals sometimes are when introduced early enough. He took to flying.

Turner had a custom leather harness built to keep Gilmore secure during flight. Gilmore had his own parachute, fitted specifically for a lion - present mostly for the photographs, but the wire services ran the image everywhere. He wore leather booties to protect his paws from hot summer asphalt. When Turner touched down at airfields across the country, the crowd surged against the fence not just to see a famous racing pilot, but to see a lion step off an airplane on a leash.

Turner spoke about Gilmore in interviews the way a man speaks about a companion rather than a prop. He monitored how the animal was doing on long flights, paid attention to the weather and altitude, and was genuinely attentive to Gilmore’s wellbeing. By every historical account, the bond was real.

The problem, as everyone who has been around growing cats eventually discovers, is that they grow. By the time Gilmore had been flying for a few years, he weighed close to 180 pounds. The cockpit could no longer accommodate him. Turner retired him to the Sacramento Zoo, and by every surviving account it was a genuine loss. The lion lived for years at the zoo; Turner visited when he could.

What Was the Thompson Trophy Race?

The Thompson Trophy Race at Cleveland was the centerpiece of the National Air Races, which ran every Labor Day weekend from the late 1920s through 1939. Entry cost fifty cents. Attendance regularly reached 100,000 people or more.

The Thompson was a closed-circuit pylon race. Pilots flew a course around a series of pylons - in practice, large fuel trucks with striped poles mounted on them - completing multiple laps covering between 50 and 100 miles total. The rules were simple: stay outside the pylons, don’t descend below fifty feet, and post the fastest average speed across all laps. Cut a pylon and the penalty would almost certainly cost the race.

From inside the aircraft, it worked like this: come off the final pylon turn and hit the straightaway at full power, fifty feet above the ground, at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour - covering roughly 367 feet every single second. The crowd in the grandstands was a blur. Then came the next pylon turn: G-load building hard, vision beginning to tunnel, holding the arc tight enough to minimize distance without bleeding the speed needed for the next straight.

Ten to fifteen minutes of that. Lap after lap.

The aircraft were custom-built for speed and nothing else. No useful load, no weather avoidance, no redundancy of any kind. The Wedell-Williams racers, designed by James Wedell in Patterson, Louisiana, were among the first great Thompson machines - small, low-wing, radial-engined, and ferocious. They were dangerous aircraft. Wedell himself died in a training accident in 1934, the same year Turner flew his design to a Thompson victory. Several other competitors died in crashes over the years, some during the race itself, some during practice. The Thompson was not a sport that separated risk from consequence.

Three Wins Nobody Has Ever Matched

1934: The First Thompson Victory

Turner flew a Wedell-Williams powered by a Pratt & Whitney Wasp Senior producing close to 800 horsepower. He won at an average speed of 248 miles per hour.

For context: the Douglas DC-2, the most advanced commercial airliner in the world that year, cruised at approximately 170 miles per hour. Turner was doing 248 around a pylon course fifty feet above Ohio.

He was not always the fastest qualifier. He was not always the man with the most horsepower or the cleanest aerodynamics on any given race day. What Turner possessed was judgment - a feel for his aircraft that told him exactly how hard he could push in the turns and how much he could extract from the engine on the straights without breaking either one. He was smooth where smooth mattered and aggressive where aggression paid dividends. He could read a race the way a chess player reads a board.

1938 and 1939: The Turner-Meteor

By the late 1930s, Turner had a new aircraft: the Turner-Meteor, also known by its sponsor name as the Ring-Free Meteor. Designed by Lawrence Brown, it was arguably the finest racing aircraft of the entire golden age - cleaner than the Wedell-Williams, lower drag, tighter cockpit. The engine was a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior, and Turner spent years working with his mechanics to understand exactly what that engine could and could not survive. Not by pushing until something broke, but by knowing the machine deeply enough to find its real limits without crossing them.

He won the Thompson in 1938 in the Meteor.

Then came 1939 - the last National Air Races before the war. The race weekend fell in early September 1939, barely one week after Germany had invaded Poland. The race went ahead as planned, but somewhere at the edges of things, people were beginning to understand that this might be the last summer of that particular world.

Turner was 43 years old. Most of the pilots lined up against him were ten to fifteen years younger. The Meteor was not the newest design on the field. He flew ten laps of the Cleveland course with the Twin Wasp Junior at full song.

Average speed: 282 miles per hour.

He won.

Three Thompson Trophy wins. No pilot in the entire history of the race - before 1934, in the brief postwar resumption after 1946, or at any point in the decades since - has ever matched it. When they handed him the trophy on the ramp at Cleveland Municipal, Turner accepted it the way you accept something you worked your entire adult life to earn. The drama had already happened, at 282 miles per hour.

After the Racing Years

When the National Air Races suspended operations for the war, they never came back in the same form.

Turner went to Indianapolis and opened the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation, where he trained Army Air Corps pilots during the war - a fitting full circle for a man who had spent twenty years making aviation look exciting to a generation that turned out to need those pilots for very real and urgent reasons. The school continued training civilian pilots after the war ended.

Turner remained in aviation as the golden age receded behind him. He died in 1970 at the age of 74.

Where to See the Turner-Meteor Today

The Turner-Meteor is on public display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Stand close enough to read the details on the engine cowling and you are standing next to one of the fastest aircraft in the world as of September 1939 - the machine that flew ten laps of an Ohio pylon course at 282 miles per hour in the last summer before the world changed.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) won the Thompson Trophy Race in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a three-win record that has never been matched in the race’s entire history.
At his fastest Thompson win in 1939, Turner averaged 282 mph over ten laps at fifty feet above the ground, at age 43, against a field of competitors a decade younger.
His years flying with Gilmore the lion - who logged cockpit time from six weeks old until he outgrew the aircraft at roughly 180 pounds - were funded by a Gilmore Oil Company sponsorship that was among the first genuine aviation sponsorships in American history.
The Turner-Meteor, designed by Lawrence Brown and powered by a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior, is considered by many historians the finest racing aircraft of aviation’s golden age and is on public display at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
After World War II ended his racing career, Turner trained Army Air Corps pilots at the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation in Indianapolis - translating two decades of spectacular aviation into direct wartime service.