Jack Turnbull was born on June 30, 1910, in
Baltimore,
Maryland. He attended
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (Poly), where he was class president his senior year. He was the captain of Poly's 1926
lacrosse team and played on the
football and
basketball teams as well. At the age of 18, he performed at the playoffs for the 1928 Olympic games. Turnbull attended
Johns Hopkins University, where he played on the 1932 team. He graduated from Hopkins with a bachelor's degree in engineering after only three years. Turnbull was named an All-American each of his 3 years on the
Johns Hopkins Blue Jays men's lacrosse team and is widely regarded as one of the best to ever play the game. At Hopkins, Turnbull also played football and helped establish an ice hockey team. Turnbull enlisted in the
Maryland National Guard as an aviation cadet and was commissioned as a
second lieutenant on June 24, 1940. He was mobilized along with the rest of the
Maryland National Guard in February 1941, just prior to the U.S. entry into
World War II. During the war he quickly rose in rank, and by 1944 he was a
lieutenant colonel. On October 20, 1944 he died of injuries sustained two days earlier, when his
B-24 crashed in
Belgium after a mid-air collision while returning from a bombing run over
Germany. • Stats are incomplete ==See also==