Longtime Flying Magazine columnist Gordon Baxter, who passed away earlier this year, was inducted in November into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, just down the Gulf Coast from Baxter's home town of Beaumont.
Before a crowd of several hundred museum members and a number of famous aviation names, former Flying writer and MD11 driver Michael Maya Charles introducted Gordon with an eloquent description, for those few in attendance who might not have been familiar with Bax's work.
In attendance were several members of Baxter's immediate family and a large number of friends of Bax. (Then again, it's hard to have a gathering of pilots in Texas without there being a sizable number of Bax's friends on hand.)
Accepting the honor for Gordon was his son Jim, who spoke of his father's grassroots love of flying and read the last few paragraphs of a passage from one of Bax's columns in which he describes the pure joy of flight as manifested in the last few seconds of the flight of a J-3 touching down on the grass late in the afternoon. It was a perfect and moving tribute.
Also inducted into the Hall of Fame were long time flight school owner and aviation pioneer Emma Carter Browning, who at 95 years of age, accepted the award in person and gave a long passionate talk about the early history of aviation; the late L.C. Lance Wade, a Texas country boy who joined the RAF in World War II and became one of the top aces of the war; the late Pat Zachary, whose company brought airports, lots of them, to Texas and the world; and the late soaring pilot Wally Scott, who dominated the record books, achieving the longest sailplane flight for the year a staggering 21 times.
Earlier this year Flying published Gordon's final article, a piece he'd penned nearly 20 years before his death about his vision of heaven. As his son Jim said at the induction ceremony, it was wonderful to hear Bax's voice one last time.
To read that last column, click here.
