Sport: Turner Sunset

“Sport? Good of aviation? Bunk! . . . We race for glory and for fame and for the money we can make.” Thus wrote swashbuckling, 43-year-old Roscoe Turner, wax-mustached dean of U. S. speed fliers, in this month’s Popular Aviation. Last week, at Cleveland, Colonel Turner (National Guard), winner of the famed Bend’x transcontinental air race (1933), won the Thompson Trophy classic, world’s No. 1 round-&-round air race, for the third time. Like a speed-drunk bumblebee, his fat little, short-winged racer whizzed 30 times around a ten-mile course in 63 min., 42.52 sec.—an average speed of 282.536 m.p.h.

After pocketing the $16,000 first-prize money, Speedster Turner, who has been chasing pylons for eleven years, announced that the sun had set on his giddy racing career. “I can’t keep stretching my luck,” he drawled. With a decade’s earnings of $65,000 in prize money and many times that amount ‘for testimonials, magazine articles, movie contracts and other perquisites that fall to a U. S. champion, Speedster Turner plans to cash in on his fame by starting a flying school.