Roscoe Turner, the Waxed Mustache, and the Lion Cub Named Gilmore Who Flew the Air Races Strapped Into His Own Parachute

Colonel Roscoe Turner was the most flamboyant pilot of aviation’s golden age - a Mississippi farm boy turned air-racing champion who flew with a pet lion cub named Gilmore strapped into a custom-made parachute. Turner is the only pilot ever to win the Thompson Trophy three times (1934, 1938, and 1939), and behind the waxed mustache and powder-blue uniform stood a genuinely gifted aviator who spent the second half of his life quietly building the everyday aviation world we live in now.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Roscoe Turner was born in Mississippi in 1895, in farm country. He served in the First World War, and like many pilots of his generation he came home to a country full of surplus airplanes and no war left to fly them in. So he barnstormed - wing walking, parachute jumps, hauling passengers for a few dollars a ride.

What set Turner apart from the start was a single insight: most pilots thought the flying was the show, but Turner understood that the pilot was the show. People don’t buy a ticket to watch an airplane. They buy a ticket to watch a person do something they’d never dare.

So he built a character around himself. He gave himself the title “Colonel” - and eventually earned an honorary commission from the state of California, so it wasn’t entirely invented. He designed a powder-blue uniform with gold buttons, riding britches, polished boots, and a diamond stickpin, topped off with a mustache he waxed to two needle points every single morning. Photographers and reporters loved him, and Turner made sure there was always something worth photographing.

The Golden Age of Air Racing

To understand Turner, you have to understand the era. In the 1920s and 1930s, avgas was cheap and airspace was free, and a bold pilot could make a living out of thin air. Air racing was enormous - the National Air Races drew hundreds of thousands of spectators, and events like the Thompson Trophy and the Bendix Trophy were front-page news.

Pilots were celebrities on the order of movie stars and prizefighters. The airplanes were little stub-winged bullets with engines twice too big for them, built to scream around pylons at full throttle a few hundred feet off the ground - the fastest, most beautiful, and most murderous machines anyone had ever built.

The Lion Named Gilmore

In 1930, Turner struck a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company of California, whose brand was a red lion. Turner painted his racer in Gilmore colors and named it the Gilmore Red Lion. Then someone - the stories differ on whose idea it was - decided the promotion needed a live lion.

The Gilmore Oil Company got Turner a lion cub, which he named Gilmore after the company. The two became the most famous flying act in America.

Gilmore was no ground-bound prop. The cub actually flew, logging real air miles in the cockpit alongside Turner - across the country, over mountains, through weather, to the races. And because the regulations of the day required a parachute for every occupant of an airplane, Turner had a custom parachute made and sized for a lion cub. He was not about to have his lion out of compliance.

Picture a farmer at the fence rail in 1931, someone who’d seen an airplane only a handful of times, watching a powder-blue racer howl in, a mustached man step out, and then reach back to lift out a lion cub in its own little parachute harness. You’d tell your grandkids about it. That was exactly the point.

What It Was Like in the Cockpit

The newsreels never captured what those racers were really like. They were bone-rattling, teeth-buzzing loud - an open or barely-enclosed cockpit with a big radial engine up front throwing back a gale of oil-smelling wind, exhaust, and the constant hammer of the pistons. The whole airframe shook. The air was thick with the sweet-sharp smell of castor oil, and the wind noise roared like a freight train.

Gilmore took to it fine as a cub - the drone of an engine puts many animals to sleep. But lions grow fast. Once Gilmore passed roughly 150 pounds, Turner had to face a hard fact: you cannot keep a full-grown lion in the cockpit of a racing airplane. The weight alone made it impossible, never mind the temperament.

So Gilmore retired from flying - but Turner didn’t get rid of him. He kept the lion, cared for him, and was genuinely devoted to the animal. When Gilmore finally died as an old lion many years later, Turner had him preserved and kept him for the rest of his own life. That’s not a promotion. That’s a friendship.

Roscoe Turner’s Racing Record

Behind the costume was real airmanship. Roscoe Turner is the only pilot who ever won the Thompson Trophy three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939. The Thompson was the closed-course race around the pylons, low and fast and unforgiving, where the smallest mistake put you into the ground in front of the whole crowd.

He also won the Bendix Trophy, the transcontinental dash flat-out across the country, and he set speed records. For a stretch of the 1930s he was simply the fastest man in American air racing and one of the most recognizable faces in the country.

Turner wasn’t content racing other men’s designs, so he had his own machine built - the Turner racer, a big, powerful, purpose-built airplane he helped shape and flew right at the ragged edge of what was possible.

Those races were brutal. This was the most dangerous era in the history of competitive flying: overpowered, under-tested airplanes, low and tight courses, no ejection seats, and almost no margin for error. Good pilots died regularly. Turner’s own friends and rivals were killed at the pylons, and he was himself involved in a fatal mid-air collision during one race that killed another pilot - an event that shook him and stayed with him. His three Thompson wins represent not luck or costume but survival at the very top of a sport that was killing the men who flew it.

The Legacy Almost Nobody Remembers

The part of Turner’s story that matters most is the part few people know. He genuinely believed airplanes were going to be for everybody. He believed in commercial aviation when it was still a rickety, dangerous, unprofitable idea, and he barnstormed partly to convince the public that flying was safe and ordinary enough for regular people.

After his racing days, Turner built a flying school and aviation business in Indianapolis, and he spent decades putting new pilots in the air and teaching young mechanics the trade. In 1952, the government awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross - not for a stunt, but for a lifetime of service to aviation.

Consider the arc: the most flamboyant showman of the golden age, the man who flew a lion around the country in a custom parachute, spent the back half of his life quietly making pilots and mechanics and building the ordinary foundation of modern aviation. The showmanship was never vanity - it was recruitment. Every kid who saw Gilmore climb out of that cockpit and went home dreaming of airplanes was Turner building the future, one wide-eyed farm kid at a time.

Colonel Roscoe Turner died in 1970, an old and honored man, his flying school still turning out pilots. His record: three Thompson Trophies, a Bendix, a Distinguished Flying Cross, and a mustache the whole country knew on sight - not a bad life for a farm boy from Mississippi and a lion cub from a California oil company. Today you can still see Turner’s own racer at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where Gilmore, remarkably, found his final home as well.

Key Takeaways

• Roscoe Turner (1895–1970) was aviation’s golden-age showman, famous for his self-designed powder-blue uniform and needle-point waxed mustache.
• He is the only pilot ever to win the Thompson Trophy three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - and also won the Bendix Trophy.
• His pet lion cub Gilmore, sponsored by the Gilmore Oil Company (1930), actually flew with him and had a custom-made parachute to satisfy regulations requiring one per occupant.
• Turner kept Gilmore for life after the lion outgrew the cockpit at around 150 pounds, and later received the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952 for lifetime service to aviation.
• He founded a flying school in Indianapolis, and both his racer and the preserved Gilmore now reside at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.