Waaaaht? Kurt Schmidt’s Fire Malcolm P. Ganz

Kurt Schmidt’s Fire

Undeterred, he moved to a position behind my typewriter, had his cigarette lighteraflame. . .

By Malcolm P. Ganz

During eight years working in PR for a major airline, headquartered in Manhattan, I’d spent two years publicizing the airline’s airport restaurant business. I worked out of an office near the test kitchen, which was the locus of activity for the company’s top food and beverage people, some of whom worked for the restaurant division, others for the airline’s hotel chain. Atop the restaurant division was a feisty Swiss named Kurt Schmidt. He had staked out his particular culinary territory and defended it against the top chefs of the hotel division.

Schmidt and his counterparts with the hotels would have these shouting matches outside my office and there was no stopping them. The verbal fisticuffs would alternate between German dialects and Germanaccented English.

“Vat dee hell you know about cooging,” Schmidt would shout.

The answer would generally be some variation of, “Vat dee hell I know? I know howto coog. Youknow how to fill out forms for airport food inspectors.”

Whomever I was talking to at the time, in my office or on the phone, was simply of no consequence to the chefs and I held no sway in brokering a culinary truce.

“Fellas? Fellas!” I’d plead, “I have the food critic for The New York Times on the phone.” A lie but drastic measures were

called for. No effect. Blowing your stack, I soon learned, was part of the persona for a great chef. Not even Carter Burnside, our intimidating chairman, could intimidate these guys. In fact, Schmidt insisted he once told Burnside, “only two people in this company know what they’re doing: you and me, and lately I’m not so sure about you.” Tough to believe anyone would talk that way to Burnside, except perhaps Schmidt.

When Schmidt needed a break from whatever he was doing, he had a habit of walking into my office and talking, irrespective of whatever I was doing at the time. Or if I were walking by his office and he wanted to talk, he’d all but order me in. Once, catching him in an unusually sunny mood, I gestured at the bust of the severelooking character on his bookshelf and asked who the guy was.

“Guy?” he retorted, the smile draining from his rosy alpine cheeks. “Guy! Auguste Escoffier, father of modern cuisine? Guy?!” He then launched into a 20-minute tirade reviling the depths of my culinary ignorance.

Once, we carried an energetic discussion out the front door, down the escalator at Grand Central Station and onto the number seven subway to our homes in Queens. Schmidt was clearly dominating to the point where I felt I needed some backup. We were sardined into an overcrowded car and literally talking through the right-angled arm of a young woman who was clutching the handhold between us. I asked if she didn’t agree with me.

“Hey,” she replied, “don’t drag me into the middle of this,” then somehow deftly removed a romance novel from her coat pocket and wrestled it up to eye level.

However, there was no denying Schmidt’s culinary artistry. When he was concocting something in the test kitchen, lunch plans were canceled by many staff members. There was no disturbing him, of course, for to do so would be life-threatening, but also because of the goodies he often produced. On one occasion, he emerged, after an entire day secluded in the kitchen, with a tray of some three dozen perfectly round chocolate balls he called, “Schmidt’s Truffles.” After having tasted one, you’d kill for more. I brought one home to my wife and, despite the fact that it had been near liquified in the plastic bag in by briefcase, she literally licked the inside of the plastic bag.

One of our last memorable encounters before I was transferred to the parent airline’s PR staff, Schmidt paraded into my office while I was in the midst of the ninth draft of a speech I was writing for Burnside. It was back in the day when typing was done on state-ofthe-art IBM electric typewriters. I was furiously trying to finish so I might get home some time before midnight.

“Kurt, I’d love to sit and chat,” I said, without looking up from my work, “but Burnside is delivering this speech tomorrow morning at the parent company’s board meeting and I gotta finish it sometime before then.” I continued rapping on the keys without looking up.

Undeterred, he moved to a position behind my typewriter, had his cigarette lighter aflame and lit the page I was typing on fire. I tore the sheet from the platen, beat it out on my desk, dropped the charred remains into my wastepaper basket, sat back in my chair and said, “so, Kurt, what is it you’d like to talk about?”

We chatted for an agonizingly long 15 minutes, then I went back to work, beginning with trying to decipher the charred remains of the page I’d been working on. Ironically, Burnside ignored the copy I finally finished and adlibbed his remarks. In retrospect, Kurt Schmidt’s fire was the highlight of that wacky memory. But, then again, Kurt would have assured me that, of course, would be the case.