Roscoe Turner: Aviation's Master Showman

                              by William Jeanes

      The years between the two World I Wars are commonly called the Golden
  Age of Aviation. In those years, pilots who once flew for the Central
  Powers and the Allies in World War I increased the world's awareness of
  aviation. The names of Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) and Capt.
  Eddie Rickenbacker were as familiar as Coca-Cola and Babe Ruth. And then
  there was Roscoe Turner.

      Born in 1895 to dirt-poor parents who lived on the outskirts of
  Corinth, Mississippi, Turner made himself into the nation's best-known
  aviator. The public adored him. He was composed of equal parts P. T.
  Barnum, Mr. Micawber, Evel Knievel, Captain Midnight and Santa Claus. In
  1934 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

      Carroll V. Glines tells the story of this remarkable personality in
  Roscoe Turner: Aviation's Master Showman.

      Roscoe Turner never made it into combat over France, but by the time
  World War I ended he was commissioned as an observation balloon pilot.
  This brush with the skies set the stage and the direction for the
  remainder of his long and colorful life, a span of years that saw him win
  air races, host radio shows, appear on cereal boxes and trading cards and
  even join with the forces of William Randolph Hearst to create a boys'
  organization called the Junior Birdmen of America, the existence of which
  this reviewer had long thought to be apocryphal.

      Mr. Glines gives us a vivid series of vignettes depicting Turner the
  perpetually underfunded barnstormer, flying from town to town. Turner was
  forever short on gasoline, but long on courage and persistence. He
  treated the country's bumpkinry to heart-stopping feats of derring-do
  that included wing walking, parachute jumping, dangerous aerobatics, and
  no end of unscheduled crashes, all conducted from rattletrap flying
  machines ill-suited to these tasks. Among Turner's more spectacular acts
  was the destruction of an entire wooden building, using a creaky war
  surplus Curtiss Jenny as the wrecking ball.

      From the day he began to fly, Turner saw himself as aviation's
  goodwill ambassador, a judgment that was not shared by his early day
  contemporaries. These worthies, uncharitably as it turned out, saw Turner
  only as a blowhard. And no wonder. From his earliest days as a
  barnstormer in the 1920s, the ex-lieutenant never appeared in public
  unless dressed in a uniform of his own design, an outfit that featured a
  sky-blue military tunic often set off by a Sam Browne belt, located above
  creamy tan jodhpurs and highly polished brown boots. On his chest
  sparkled diamond-encrusted wings bearing his intertwined RT logo. Topping
  off this ensemble was a peaked military officer's cap beneath which
  strode 220 pounds of Southern charm punctuated by a toothy Teddy
  Roosevelt smile and a waxed moustache that Adolphe Menjou or Mandrake the
  Magician would have admired. Turner's explanation for making himself a
  spectacle was that he believed aviation deserved a better public image
  than greasy overalls and even greasier reputations.

      "After a day's work is done," wrote Turner, "you can take a towel and
  Carbona and clean all spots. Then you are ready to go to dinner or
  theater, dance or any place." Underscoring his mission as aviation's
  proselyte, Turner added, "If you look like a tramp or a blacksmith, how
  can you expect to meet the people who are able to support your business?"

      Turner associated himself with the Gilmore Oil Company in 1930 and
  began flying everywhere with a lion cub named Gilmore, a living
  embodiment of the oil company's lion-head trademark. If Turner's costume
  and stunts did not make him a household word, Gilmore did. Mr. Glines's
  account of Gilmore's growth from cub to adulthood is one of the book's
  more charming sections. After dying in 1952, Gilmore was stuffed and
  installed in the Turner den for years before winding up at the National
  Air & Space Museum's Garber Facility near Washington, D.C. (where he may
  still be viewed).

      If flying with a lion was not the stuff of which Hollywood was made,
  what was? Turner knew Will Rogers (then mayor of Beverly Hills), Clark
  Gable, Howard Hughes, Bebe Daniels, Wallace Beery and a host of others.
  Yet even his Hollywood years were plagued with money problems.

      Turner agreed to lease himself and his plane to Howard Hughes for the
  making of Hells Angels. The production, like so many of Hughes's film
  endeavors, stretched on interminably, a circumstance that would seem to
  bode well for plane lessors. Alas, Turner-who never made a good deal if a
  bad one was available-had not read his contract carefully, missing a
  clause that specified the Hughes organization would take title to his
  plane after a specified number of lease payments had been made. He
  finished the movie as an aviator with wide Hollywood contacts but no
  plane of his own.

      Mr. Glines leaves us no room to doubt that Roscoe Turner was a
  visionary, seeing the future of aviation as the rightful province of both
  warriors and business travelers. He set out to demonstrate his beliefs to
  a government and a public that still looked upon those who flew as
  raffish, foolhardy curiosities. Turner, assuredly, was a curiosity, and
  he had long been thought to be as full of hot air as a Mexican wind sock,
  but his racing victories and his record-setting, done against the best
  the skies could hold, legitimized his claim to a place in the aviation
  pantheon, though he never quite rid himself of the public perception that
  he was a genial buffoon.

      Yet, as Mr. Glines shows, Turner ought not be remembered as a clown.
  When the aviation record books are examined, Roscoe Turner is found to
  deserve the accolades that later came his way if for only two
  accomplishments: he was one of only two pilots to win both the Bendix
  Trophy and the Thompson Trophy (the other being the famed Tokyo raider
  General Jimmy Doolittle). In addition, Turner was the only pilot to turn
  a hat trick at the suicidal closed-course National Air Races and its
  attendant Thompson Trophy, winning it in 1934, 1938 and 1939. His win at
  the Bendix Trophy Race, a cross-country derby run that year from New York
  to Los Angeles, came in 1933. In 1934, he finished second in the
  MacRobertson International Air Race, run from London to Sydney,
  Australia. He was awarded the Harmon Trophy for being named the nation's
  premier aviator for 1938.

      Roscoe Turner is one of a series of books that constitute the
  Smithsonian Institution's History of Aviation Series, and the volume is
  indeed far closer to aviation history than biography. This is somewhat
  unfortunate, if only because the reader never sees Turner as a full
  person.

      Two examples serve to illustrate this, both involving a Turner wife
  (there were two). The breakup of his marriage to Carline Stovall, a
  Corinth girl whom he wed on his 29th birthday in 1924, is given less than
  a paragraph. Their wedding, a true Turner production, gets more space:
  the betrothed couple occupied two seats of a creaky aircraft sitting on
  the dirt of the Suratt pasture at Corinth, repeating vows spoken by a
  minister teetering on the wing. This spectacle resulted in nationwide
  publicity for the ncwlywcds. His courtship and marriage to Madonna Miller
  in 1946, which took place only eight days following his final divorce
  decree, is discussed almost as briefly as his first marriage. Obviously,
  some degree of what would have then been called hankypanky occurred. The
  interested reader is left in the lurch.

      Turner called a halt to his racing activities at the end of the
  1930s, about the time the U.S. entry into World War II was becoming a
  real possibility. Too old to serve on active duty, despite a genuine
  desire to do so (he wrote to Jimmy Doolittle suggesting that a squadron
  of forty-year-old-plus pilots could devastate the foes by dint of craft
  and experience) Turner had to settle  for opening a flying school and
  aircraft servicing center in Indianapolis, a site he believed had
  potential as an airline base. This school-cum-business, which took
  various forms, survived financially due in no small part to the
  management skills of Madonna Turner. She had been working as an
  accountant when the two met, and her business acumen arguably allowed
  Roscoe to spend his declining years somewhere other than the poorhouse.

      Roscoe Turner died in 1970, three months before his seventy-fifth
  birthday.  Among his numerous honors was not only a Distinguished Flying
  Cross (awarded by a 1952 act of Congress because Turner was a civilian),
  but also membership in the National Aviation Hall of Fame. Madonna Turner
  established a Roscoe Turner museum at the Indianapolis airport. It
  survived less than two years, despite the presence of the late Gilmore.

     Source:  OXFORD AMERICAN, Oxford, MS, August/September  1995, p. 76.

  RT207