Roscoe Turner, the Ring-Master of the Air, and the Lion Cub Named Gilmore Who Flew the National Air Races Golden Age Come Alive in the Vintage Rows at Oshkosh

Roscoe Turner was one of the greatest showmen and racing pilots of American aviation’s golden age, famous for flying with a live African lion named Gilmore and for winning the prestigious Thompson Trophy an unmatched three times. Behind the powder-blue uniform and waxed mustache was a genuinely gifted aviator who understood that spectacle and skill were never separate things. His legacy lives on every summer in the vintage rows and roaring flightline of EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Roscoe Turner came up from nothing. Born a farm boy in Corinth, Mississippi, he worked as a mechanic and served as an ambulance driver in the First World War before catching the flying bug for good.

He barnstormed, wingwalked, and even flew a captured German bomber around the country giving rides. Somewhere in all that dust and sweat, Turner learned a truth most pilots never grasp: flying is a business, and a business needs a customer.

In the 1920s and 1930s, nobody was going to pay a farm boy just for being good - there were a thousand good pilots, most of them broke. So Turner decided he wouldn’t merely be a pilot. He would be a character, a brand, a show.

The Powder-Blue Uniform and the Waxed Mustache

Turner didn’t dress like a pilot. He dressed like a field marshal from a country that didn’t exist: a powder-blue tunic, whipcord riding breeches, gleaming knee-high boots, a diamond stickpin, dinner-plate-sized wings, and a waxed mustache he trained to points every single morning.

People laughed. Turner didn’t care - because while they laughed, they looked, and looking was the whole idea.

He designed the uniform himself. When the Army pointed out he wasn’t entitled to wear a military uniform, Turner secured a colonel’s commission in the Nevada National Guard to make it legal. If a rule got in the way of the show, he’d go find a rule that fit.

The Lion in the Cockpit: The Story of Gilmore

Turner flew across the United States with a live African lion riding in the cockpit. The lion’s name was Gilmore.

Turner held a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company, whose mascot was a lion. A painted lion on the cowling wasn’t enough for him, so he acquired a real lion cub and named it after the sponsor.

Gilmore logged hundreds of flying hours all over the country, seated beside Turner in a custom parachute harness. Aeronautics officials insisted that if Turner wore a chute, so did his passenger - and the lion counted as a passenger.

The routine was pure theater: a powder-blue airplane howling in over the grandstand, snapping into a chandelle, taxiing in. The canopy would open, and out would climb a man with a diamond stickpin - followed by a lion. The crowd went out of their minds every single time.

Was Roscoe Turner Actually a Good Pilot?

It would be easy to write Turner off as a clown. That would be a mistake.

Underneath the mustache wax and the lion, Turner could flat-out fly, with a mind for the sport years ahead of his rivals. The Thompson Trophy was the big one - unlimited closed-course pylon racing, the fastest and most dangerous flying in the world. Men regularly died turning too hard into the pylons, gone in a fireball in front of a hundred thousand people.

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939. No one else ever won it three times.

He also won the Bendix Trophy, the coast-to-coast cross-country dash, and set transcontinental speed records flying mail and airline routes faster than anyone before him. He was selling a show, but he was also selling the future - and he knew the difference even when his audience didn’t.

The Turner Meteor: An Airplane Built to Win

By the late 1930s, Turner wanted a machine built to his own specifications. History remembers it as the Turner Meteor - a low-wing racer built around a monster fourteen-cylinder Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radial cranking out north of 1,000 horsepower, crammed into an airframe barely big enough to hold it.

Short wings. A big paddle propeller. Unmistakable gold-and-white Turner paint. The airplane had almost no gliding ability - loaded like that, it flew like a rocket under power and came down “like a set of car keys” when the engine quit.

Racing it meant strapping yourself to twelve hundred horses and carving a wingtip around pylons staked in the dirt, close enough to see the faces in the crowd. Turner did exactly that - and won - at an age when most racers had already quit or died.

Walking Away on Top

Golden-age air racers rarely retired. The sport killed them, or the war ended it. Turner did neither.

After his third Thompson win in 1939, with another war coming, he hung it up while he was on top. He turned his showmanship and flying sense into a legitimate business: a flying school, an airline service, and hangars bearing his name in Indianapolis. He trained pilots and lived a long life doing it.

In his later years he became exactly what he had always dressed up as - a respected elder of American aviation. The same government that once told him he couldn’t wear a uniform awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross for his airmail speed work. And the mustache stayed waxed to the very end.

Why Roscoe Turner Still Matters at Oshkosh

Stand in the vintage rows at Wittman Regional Airport during AirVenture - surrounded by Stearmans, Wacos, and round-motor airplanes that were flying when Turner was king - and you’re standing in the direct descendant of what he understood better than anyone.

The afternoon airshow, the thundering warbirds, the paint and smoke, the night airshow’s wall of fire, the announcer’s voice rolling across a quarter-million people - it’s all a show in the best sense. It’s aviation grabbing an ordinary person by the collar and saying, look at this.

That’s pure Roscoe Turner. He grasped that you don’t grow aviation by being quiet and serious about it. You grow it by putting on a spectacle that makes an eight-year-old in the grandstand decide that someday that will be them up there. The powder-blue uniform and the three Thompson trophies came from the same man - the show and the substance always do.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner was a Mississippi farm boy who reinvented himself as aviation’s greatest showman, complete with a self-designed powder-blue uniform and a waxed mustache.
He won the dangerous Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, 1939) - a record no other pilot ever matched - plus the Bendix Trophy and multiple transcontinental speed records.
His pet lion, Gilmore, named for sponsor Gilmore Oil, flew hundreds of hours with him in a custom parachute harness.
His racing machine, the Turner Meteor, used a 1,000+ horsepower Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radial and had almost no gliding ability.
Turner retired on top after 1939, built a lasting aviation business, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross - proof that showmanship and genuine skill were always the same story.