Roscoe Turner
American aviatorWikipedia
32
MENTIONS
6
EPISODES
1
PODCASTS
Search complete. 32 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Roscoe Turner".
Oct 19, 2026
P
Unknown podcast
Roscoe Turner, the Laird-Turner Meteor, and the Lion Who Won Three Thompson Trophies
Oct 19 · 5 Mentions
T
0:24Tail DraggerHOST
A real breathing, amber-eyed lion cub named Gilmore, strapped in beside his pilot.
T
0:29Tail DraggerHOST
Apparently unbothered by the noise, the pilot is Roscoe Turner.
T
0:32Tail DraggerHOST
And if that name doesn't mean anything to you right now, it will by the time we're done.
T
0:37Tail DraggerHOST
I'm TailDragger.
T
2:58Tail DraggerHOST
Gilmore Oil Company was a California gasoline brand.
T
3:01Tail DraggerHOST
Their mascot was a lion, their marketing people were looking for ways to get attention in the aviation market.
T
3:07Tail DraggerHOST
Roscoe Turner walked in wearing his uniform, trailing his reputation, and somewhere in that conversation, somebody had the idea.
T
3:14Tail DraggerHOST
What if the mascot wasn't just a logo on a billboard? Turner acquired a lion cub through a zoo contact, named him Gilmore, and started flying with him.
P
Unknown podcast
Roscoe Turner, the Thompson Trophy, and the Air Racing King Who Flew with a Lion
Oct 17 · 5 Mentions
T
0:15Tail DraggerHOST
The pilot sitting next to that lion is wearing a uniform he designed himself, jawed purrs, riding boots, a tailored military tunic with wings on the chest, a wax purrs, riding boots, a tailored military tunic with wings on the chest, a wax mustache that comes to a perfect, deliberate point on each side.
T
0:34Tail DraggerHOST
That pilot is Roscoe Turner.
T
0:36Tail DraggerHOST
And if his name doesn't ring a bell, you have been missing one of the most vivid stories in the history of American aviation.
T
0:42Tail DraggerHOST
I'm Tail Dragger.
T
3:01Tail DraggerHOST
He found a barber who could teach him to properly wax a mustache, and he worked on it until the points were exact.
T
3:07Tail DraggerHOST
He pressed the uniform before every appearance.
T
3:09Tail DraggerHOST
When Roscoe Turner walked across a ramp, people turned around, that was the calculation.
T
3:14Tail DraggerHOST
And the calculation was right.
P
Unknown podcast
Roscoe Turner, the Gilmore Lion, and the Thompson Trophy Pilot Who Made the Golden Age His Personal Stage
Oct 14 · 13 Mentions
T
0:32Tail DraggerHOST
The pylons are set out across the flat Ohio farmland west of the airport, bright orange, thirty feet tall, marking the closed course around which the fastest piston engine airplanes in the world are about to race.
T
0:43Tail DraggerHOST
And then Roscoe Turner strides to his airplane.
T
0:46Tail DraggerHOST
He doesn't walk.
T
0:47Tail DraggerHOST
Nobody who ever encountered Roscoe Turner used that word.
T
0:50Tail DraggerHOST
He arrives, fully turned out in his custom powder blue uniform, a design he had made for himself that sits somewhere between an Air Corps dress uniform and a Hollywood costume.
T
0:59Tail DraggerHOST
Riding breeches and polished boots, Sam Browne belt across the chest, and the mustache waxed to perfect needle points, which in 1934 is quite possibly the most photographed mustache in American aviation.
T
2:38Tail DraggerHOST
You could stand at the fence and watch the airplane come around the pylon at full power and feel the wake of it in your chest.
T
2:44Tail DraggerHOST
A man with enough nerve and enough skill and enough vision could make himself famous in that world.
P
Unknown podcast
Jacqueline Cochran, the Bendix Trophy She Won When Nobody Expected Her to Win It, and the May Morning at Edwards When She Broke the Sound Barrier in an F-86 Sabre
Oct 11 · 1 Mention
T
4:06Tail DraggerHOST
Jimmy Doolittle had won it.
T
4:08Tail DraggerHOST
Roscoe Turner had won it.
T
4:09Tail DraggerHOST
Benny Howard had won it.
T
4:10Tail DraggerHOST
The names on that trophy were a who's who of American aviation's elite.
P
Unknown podcast
Jacqueline Cochran, the Bendix Trophy, and the Sound Barrier No Woman Had Ever Touched
Oct 9 · 1 Mention
T
12:04Tail DraggerHOST
Howard Hughes had a personal fortune and access to resources most pilots never touched.
T
12:08Tail DraggerHOST
Roscoe Turner had corporate backers and famously brought a lion to air races because he could.
T
12:13Tail DraggerHOST
The standard of requiring a pilot to succeed with no financial support before their achievements truly count was a standard that nobody applied to the men Cochran beat.
T
12:22Tail DraggerHOST
She had resources.
P
Unknown podcast
Roscoe Turner, Gilmore the Lion, and the Thompson Trophy Pilot Who Made Air Racing America's Favorite Spectator Sport
Oct 7 · 7 Mentions
T
1:13Tail DraggerHOST
Fifty thousand people roar back at him.
T
1:15Tail DraggerHOST
His name is Roscoe Turner, and if you want to understand what aviation meant to ordinary Americans in the years between the wars, you need to understand this man.
T
1:23Tail DraggerHOST
I'm Taildragger.
T
1:24Tail DraggerHOST
This is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.
T
1:26Tail DraggerHOST
Pull up a chair.
T
1:27Tail DraggerHOST
This one is a good one.
T
1:28Tail DraggerHOST
Roscoe Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi, son of a farmer.
T
1:32Tail DraggerHOST
No money, no connections, no obvious path to anything beyond the fields and the small-town life that Mississippi offered boys born at the bottom of the economic ladder in those years.