Gordon Baxter, nicknamed Bax, was a well-known Texas radio personality, an author of books and a columnist for newspapers and magazines. He was a lifelong resident of Southeast Texas, having grown up in Port Arthur where he was born. He lived near Beaumont during most of his professional years and was probably best known locally as a radio heartland humorist in the Jean Shepherd tradition. He was also known nationally to several generations of pilots who read his columns on the joys of flying in the aviation magazine, Flying. Baxter was entranced by aviation from childhood. At the age of ten, he paid "a 1933 fortune" of five dollars for his first airplane ride in a Curtiss Condor and was hooked on flying. Despite a slow start in the cockpit and as a writer, by the end of his writing career he had spent more than 25 years with Flying, written 13 books and contributed to a MicrosoftCD-ROM title, World of Flight. During World War II, Baxter joined the Army Air Corps, hoping to be a pilot. Baxter himself noted that his ruination as a military pilot was predicted in high school by a math teacher who told Gordon that he spent too much time dreaming and drawing airplanes and not enough time studying. In the Army Air Corps, he trained in a Stearman. He entered the Merchant Marine as an officer, but after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific, he became a turret gunner in B-17s. Once there, he became a sharpshooter in every turret position. It was only after World War II that he succeeded in soloing in a Luscombe, eventually becoming an active pilot in the late 1950s.
Radio
After the war he initially worked as a Mississippi River boatman, then became a familiar voice on Port Arthur and Beaumont radio stations. His afternoon show of the 1950s attracted many young listeners as Baxter unleashed wild humor between novelty and satire recordings, sometimes leaving the studio for shows on location. As his radio fame increased, he often was invited to emcee at shows and events throughout East Texas. Bill Lambright recalled Baxter's radio antics:
Wild blue yonder
Baxter also contributed to weekly newspapers in Texas. In 1970, he was discovered by the senior editor for Flying, who had been in town for a Rotary Club speech. Baxter's discovery came because he pushed into editor Archie Trammell's hands three articles about flying, each originally published in the Kountze, Texas weekly newspaper. Those three articles, "Houn Dog", "Cross City" and "The Wide Job" were the first three Bax Seat columns. His shortest column, published in 1973, reflects the humor present in all of his writing:
Village Creek
He and his second wife, Diane, lived in Village Creek, near Beaumont. His book, Village Creek, was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews in 1979: His writing was so vivid that Flying started an annual Bax Seat Trophy in 1999 for the most-inspiring aviation writing. His character and attitude towards flying were reflected in his Flying editor's comments in the preface to the book Bax Seat, published in 1978, "Bax tries to pass himself off as a pilot, but don’t believe him. He never could fly worth a damn. But Gordon feels airplanes, loves and honors them in ways the rest of us are ashamed to admit." Among his many accomplishments was his acting debut in filmmaker J. D. Feigelson's One of the Missing for PBS. Based on an Ambrose Bierce short story, Baxter plays the lead role of Confederate Sharpshooter Jerome Searing. The show aired in the spring of 1979 to high praise from the critics. Judith Crist called it "trenchant." Ray Bradbury said it was "extraordinary." It was repeated in 2004 with Charles Durning as host and has been the recipient of numerous awards. He was also a semi-regular contributor to "Car and Driver" magazine in the early to mid-1980s, writing about his equal love of vintage cars, hot rods and other auto-related stories. Though Baxter was always hanging around airplanes and writing about them when he was not at the airport, it was not until 1957 that he got his private pilots license, and only in the 1970s, when he started becoming visible with his Flying column, that the magazine's editors pushed him into upgrading his flying skills. At that point, Baxter added a multi-engine rating, then commercial, glider and seaplane ratings. Finally, Baxter tackled the instrument rating. The chaos of pursuing the instrument rating produced yet another column and one of his best-known quotations opened that column: "Instrument flying, I had concluded, is an unnatural act, probably punishable by God." Baxter died at age 81, leaving behind nine children and 16 grandchildren. He is buried at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Groves, Texas. He is a 2007 inductee into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame.
