Additional Baxter television series for CBS included Renaissance on TV (1956–57), devoted to classical philosophy, literature, and art, and Now and Then (1954–55), which enlightened viewers on subjects ranging from Altimira cave drawings to Elizabethan naval battles.

[3] The Written Word, a 15-part series on the history of books and printing featuring Baxter as presenter, aired nationwide in 1958 on both educational and commercial networks including ABC.

[5][6] Born in Newbold, New Jersey, Baxter served as a medical corpsman in the American Expeditionary Force in France under General John Pershing during World War I.

Beginning in 1926, he took on part-time work as a lecturer at Swarthmore College[7] and as a radio broadcaster on WOO in Philadelphia, regaling listeners (according to his self-deprecating description) with narratives about "split infinitives and the simple life.

Beginning in the 1930s, he began an annual tradition of public readings at Christmas time, delivered to an oversubscribed 1,500-seat auditorium in USC's Founders Hall that spilled out to include an audience of hundreds more on the lawn outside, who listened via loudspeaker.

As a result of the films, Baxter (who in real life was a USC English professor and had not been a scientist since the early days of his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania) became an almost universally-known scientific icon among Baby Boomers.

For example, on NBC's Peabody Award-winning drama series Mr. Novak, based upon an idealistic English teacher in Los Angeles who often became involved in the lives of his students and fellow faculty, Baxter played an industrialist giving out a scholarship.

[13] Baxter's mass media credits also include one feature film, a science fiction-horror romp of the sort popular in the 1950s in which he appeared as himself, presumably to lend credibility to the incredible plot.

He maintained his old office at USC, where for eight years he had been Chairman of the English Department and President of the Faculty Senate, and even into his 80s he continued to hold court on campus as "Reader in Residence."

His famed Noon Readings, occasional lectures, and annual Christmas presentations in Bovard Hall were so popular they were news items in the Los Angeles Times, announced with headlines such as "Dr. Frank Baxter Will Visit USC.

"Dr. Baxter is most certainly a fine actor," the Daily Trojan opined, who "can make plays come to life — whether they be Shakespeare, Shaw, or Arthur Miller — by merely recreating a scene.