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.
Four years later, he was a member of the U.S. field hockey team at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, during which he met Adolf Hitler.
[2] 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.
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.