VILLAGE CREEK: The First and Only Eyewitness Account of the Second Life of Gordon Baxter by Himself

Thirty years an East Texas disk jockey, a columnist, pilot, and public character, Baxter writes like it isn't any trouble, like he was just spilling over, as he tells about himself from a Depression childhood, a wartime bout in the Merchant Marine, and on up. Up leads him through a midlife crisis and out into the sunshine of a cabin on Village Creek, near Beaumont, and a loving new wife some 20 years his junior but his equal in backbone. Baxter, affectingly, doesn't blur either her intense individuality or his own; nor does he pretend that things are always easy between them. He also admits his guilt at having left a good woman who bore him eight children he never really had time for. Baxter can ramble--as any deejay will--and sometimes he falls into a neat little essay that could have been left out, or soars into highfalutin' rhetoric with a veneer of folksiness. But mostly he sounds like the guy on the next barstool, only a whole lot funnier. At his best, he'll tell you about his cat Pearl, a lady with too-frequent litters, and her son Fleetwood Keats, the Houston Cadillac dealer tomcat; about his new baby and his helpful neighbors; or about daily life on a creek that periodically floods his property nearly to the living room rug. Baxter obviously likes to get his feet wet and leave his damp tracks around for all to see--as in this lively, likable book.