Air Racing
Turner set the east to west transcontinental airspeed record at 12 hours and 33 minutes, from New York to Burbank, California, on November 14, 1930. Turner bettered by two hours and 17 minutes the former mark set by Frank Hawks. He also won the Bendix Trophy in 1933 and the Thompson trophy in 1934, 1938 and 1939. He was well on his way to win the 1936 Thompson when engine failure forced him out. He also competed strongly in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race. He retired from racing after the 1939 Thompson race claiming that, at the age of 44, he was too old to race anymore.
He was sponsored by many companies but he is probably best known for his endorsement of the Gilmore Oil Company. They provided him with a lion cub named "Gilmore" for publicity; complete with a cub-sized parachute, Turner would frequently take "Gilmore" on tour with him. (Gilmore Oil Company was later absorbed by the Socony-Vacuum company, which itself was later to become the Mobil company). When Gilmore died in 1952, his body was stuffed, mounted and put on display in the Turner home. Currently, Gilmore is owned by the Smithsonian Institution who keep his carcass preserved in cold storage.
Read more about this topic: Roscoe Turner
Famous quotes containing the words air and/or racing:
“The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature—were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)