Word: toed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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The son of a salesman, Frank Baxter did not start out to be a teacher at all. He began as a waterboy in Philadelphia's Hammerstein opera house (he carried glasses of water to singers in the wings), later became a clerk and bookkeeper for a manufacturing company.
It was not until after World War I (where, he says, he was wounded when a case of salmon fell on his foot-"It gives me a picturesque limp on rainy days") that he went through the University of Pennsylvania and graduated summa cum laude. As soon as he could...
All Overtones. It was not to be a scholar. "I'm just a schoolmaster," Baxter would say. He was also, he would add, "the last of the sentimentalists." To him literature was more than facts and footnotes: "It is all overtones. History is clear cut. Geography stays put. But...
To him the past is thrilling. Except for coeds who knit in class, nothing irritates him more than people who refuse to look back. "Anyone who thinks that the world began in 1921," he snaps, "has missed the boat as a human being." Before each of Shakespeare's plays...
Today, at 53, Baxter gets embarrassed when students speak of him as their favorite professor. "I don't want them to be aware of me," he insists. "It's the subject they're learning, not the professor." Keeping them unaware of their professor was one of few...