• U.S.

Education: Sentimentalist

3 minute read
TIME

Along University Avenue at the University of Southern California one afternoon last week, some 100 students huddled in the rain, waiting for the voice that would soon come through the loudspeaker. Inside Bovard Auditorium, 1,500 more waited in their seats. Finally, Professor Frank C. Baxter, dressed in a 20-year-old dark blue suit, mounted the podium and took his place behind a-lectern piled with books. As the murmuring and chattering stopped, the professor began to read.

In twelve years, Frank Baxter’s annual Christmas readings had become a tradition at U.S.C. A pink-faced, bouncy man who gives the readings his dramatic best, he has had enthusiastic audiences since he began. Last week he went from Dickens to Benchley, from a medieval carol (“From far away we come to you . . .”) to Ogden Nash (“Epstein, Spare that Yule Log!”), to poems written by soldiers at Tobruk.

Glasses of Water. Whatever he read, his audience loved it. For that matter, students approved most everything Frank Baxter did, in or out of his Shakespeare class. “If you haven’t taken a course from Dr. Baxter,” the daily Trojan last week declared, “you haven’t been to college.” U.S.C. students had voted him the man “who should teach all the classes in the university.”

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 he headed for Cambridge University, there “to walk over door sills that had been worn by 600 years of students and to sit in lecture rooms where Marlowe and Milton had sat.” He had long since made up his mind what his life’s work would be.

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 poetry—that’s so different.”

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, he carefully lays the scene—the Denmark of Hamlet, the England of the Henrys, a physical description of Cleopatra (“I fumble around with this damn business to make the past seem eloquent”). Then he launches into the plays themselves, acting out each part. “Students must experience Shakespeare,” he says, “not just read his words.”

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 things in which he had failed. Like Shakespeare, Frank Baxter was one of the experiences at U.S.C.

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