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. 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:

I had the thrill of listening to Barefoot Bathless Baxter (as we called him in the 40s 50s-60s) on the radio in Port Arthur, Texas, where we both were born. Bax was 20+ years my senior, but his childlike joys of flight and homespun humor spoke to me as a kid as well as all in his radio audience listening to KPAC, the voice of Port Arthur College. If I need a good laugh today or touch of home, I read Bax!

Before Bax was an aviator though he was a sailor in the US Merchant Marine. He could identify ships by the patterns of their smoke stacks as they sailed down the Intercoastal Canal which he could see from KPAC's control room! I traveled the world in my mind as he described his adventures on the high seas. When I was in the Navy I'd spend at least several hours of my furlough time watching Baxter perform on the radio! He would spin records with his bare feet. His commercials were as entertaining as the music and other antics he would pull. Believe me he had to mature a lot to master the techniques of flying a plane or maybe he flew his Mooney barefoot. I don't know! I followed him on the radio as he learned to fly his first airplane. I wish those programs had been recorded. They would be priceless, but those were the days before audio tape!

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:

Naked City Airport, Indiana. Turf strip overrun with parked cars of a crowd of 7,000 who came to view 50 naked girls vying for title of Miss Nude America, and four naked parachute jumpers. Unable to obtain other data, notebook was with my clothes.

He and his second wife, Diane, lived in Village Creek, near Beaumont. His book, Village Creek, was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews in 1979:

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.

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 is his movie debut in filmmaker J.D Feigelson's PBS movie One of the Missing. 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, "extraordinary."It was reaired in 2004 with Charles Durning as host and has been the recipient of numerous awards.

Though Baxter was always hanging around airplanes and writing about them when he wasn’t 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.