Roscoe Turner, the Laird-Turner Meteor, and the Lion Who Won Three Thompson Trophies

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no other pilot matched in the history of the National Air Races. He accomplished it flying purpose-built machines at the absolute limit of pre-war technology, while simultaneously becoming the most recognizable face in American aviation. One of those machines carried a lion.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi. He attempted to enter military aviation during World War I, learned to fly, but the war ended before he saw combat. Rather than treating that as a reprieve, he treated it as a problem. He’d found the thing that made him feel like himself, and the war had removed the venue.

He solved that by finding his own.

Surplus Curtiss Jennies flooded the postwar market at low prices. Young pilots bought them, flew them to county fairs, and charged fifty cents a ride. Turner thrived in that world - but he saw something most of his contemporaries missed.

How Turner Understood Aviation as Theater

The crowd at a barnstorming show didn’t just want a ride. They wanted a hero. Turner understood this with a clarity that most people never develop about themselves.

He designed a uniform: a blue tailored jacket with a Sam Browne belt, riding jodhpurs, and polished boots. He grew a mustache waxed to perfect points. The result looked like something out of a picture magazine - which, increasingly, is exactly where it appeared.

Critics called it fraud. A more accurate read is that Turner was inventing a persona as deliberately as any modern public relations team would construct, built from scratch by a kid from Mississippi who grasped that in a field crowded with leather jackets and oil-stained hands, distinction was a competitive advantage.

The Gilmore Lion: How It Actually Worked

By the late 1920s, Turner’s reputation had attracted corporate sponsors. Gilmore Oil Company, a California gasoline brand whose mascot was a lion, was looking for ways to break through in the aviation market. Turner walked in wearing his uniform, trailing his reputation, and the idea emerged: what if the mascot wasn’t just a logo?

Turner acquired a lion cub through a zoo contact and named him Gilmore.

What followed required genuine engineering. Gilmore needed a custom-built harness, resized as he grew. The cockpits of 1930s racing aircraft were not generous with space. As Turner began attempting transcontinental speed records in the early 1930s, altitude presented another problem: Gilmore needed oxygen in thin air. Turner had a small oxygen mask made for him.

Gilmore flew with Turner for years. When he grew too large to safely share a cockpit - a full-grown male lion is not a small animal - he was retired to a zoo in California. Turner visited him.

Turner’s First Thompson Trophy Win: 1934

The Thompson Trophy was the centerpiece of the National Air Races, held annually through the 1930s primarily in Cleveland, Ohio. A closed pylon course, multiple laps at full throttle, pilots flying low and fast around markers in aircraft built for speed and nothing else. One hundred thousand spectators attended on the best days. Pilots died at these events. The crowds came anyway.

Turner’s first win came in 1934, flying a Wedell-Williams racer - a low-wing monoplane with a liquid-cooled engine designed by James Wedell and backed by Harry Williams. The Wedell-Williams machines were among the premier racing platforms of the early 1930s and uninterested in making a mediocre pilot look good.

Turner flew that race with smooth, deliberate precision. He held his lines. He made no mistakes. He crossed the finish line ahead of the field.

Why Turner Built the Laird-Turner Meteor

After 1934, Turner reached a conclusion: if he wanted to win consistently, he needed an aircraft designed around him specifically. Not someone else’s machine with his name on the side.

He partnered with Emil “Matty” Laird of the E.M. Laird Airplane Company in Chicago. Laird had a reputation for building fast, clean aircraft that actually flew the way pilots wanted them to fly. Together they designed the Laird-Turner Meteor, designated the LTR-14.

The Meteor was a completely original design: a sleek, low-wing monoplane with retractable gear and a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior engine - a 14-cylinder, twin-row radial producing roughly 1,000 horsepower - fitted into an airframe stripped of every excess ounce. The cowling sat tight to the cylinders. The lines were severe. It looked like someone had used a slide rule and refused to let sentiment influence a single curve.

Turner put his own money into the project during a period when the Depression had still not fully loosened its grip. That required a specific kind of faith - in the machine and in himself.

Three Thompson Trophies: What the Record Actually Means

The Meteor delivered. Turner won the Thompson Trophy in 1938 and again in 1939, giving him three total wins - more than any other pilot in the history of the race.

The span from his first win to his third was five years. During those five years, aircraft design was advancing rapidly, top-tier competitors were flying at the limit of what was possible, and the margins were getting thinner. Turner kept adapting. He kept learning. He was at the top of the field when the curtain came down.

The 1939 race was his last. When war came to Europe and American military priorities shifted, the National Air Races were suspended. The golden age of closed-course air racing ended with Turner holding its most significant record.

What Turner Did After Racing

Turner opened a flight school: the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation, based in Indianapolis, Indiana. When the United States entered World War II and needed tens of thousands of trained pilots quickly, his school was ready. He trained military and civilian pilots at scale. The showman with the lion turned out to be one of the most effective aviation educators of his generation.

That fact tends to complicate the easy narrative about golden age showmen - that the spectacle was separate from the substance. Turner was both. The image was deliberate, but it was built on genuine skill, genuine courage, and a genuine understanding of what aviation meant.

Turner died in June 1970 at age 74. He had been inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio. By then, jets were routine, the moon landings had happened, and the era of pylon racing in surplus-engine monoplanes was a memory most of the country had stopped keeping.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) won the Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, 1939), a record in National Air Races history.
He partnered with Matty Laird to build the Laird-Turner Meteor (LTR-14), a custom racer powered by a ~1,000-hp Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior.
Turner’s Gilmore Oil sponsorship included flying with an actual lion cub named Gilmore, who required a custom harness and oxygen mask at altitude.
His persona - the uniform, the mustache, the lion - was a calculated construction, but it rested on elite technical skill and thousands of hours of hard-earned experience.
After racing, Turner ran the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation in Indianapolis, training military pilots at scale during World War II.

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives; period accounts from Aviation and Popular Aviation magazines; air racing records of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, Dayton, Ohio.