Interview with Frank Schmidt Part Four                            Back

You mentioned something earlier about how the type face for the Lear Jet Stereo logo came to be …

Oh, yeah. We were using that kind of raised lettering on the cartridge. Well, we would see Bill [Lear] about 2-3 times a week… he’d wander in. Of course his right hand man was Sam Auld. Sam was saying "hey, we need to come up with a logo for Lear Stereo." Back then it wasn’t computerized, so we out to some supply places and bought 20 or 30 different type faces using these rub-on letters, and wrote out "Lear Stereo, Inc." in different fonts. Lear never liked any of them (laughs)! So I said "Sorry Bill, tell me what you want!" It never looked good enough. I remember one afternoon he was flying in from Wichita, and he rented a car. He came walking in to the engineering department and he was carrying a door off the glove box from the Pontiac he had rented! He threw the door down and said "this is the font I want! This is the style I want!" He had just ripped the door right out of the rental car. Later on they put it in that stylized oval, but that’s where the style came from him.

What was Lear like?

He was a weird character. One of the first things we had to do when we set up our plant in Detroit was remove all the clocks out of the building. The Lear factory, office, plant, whatever, never had a clock in it. It was like a gambling casino… he didn’t want you to know what time it was.

Another thing was that Lear never slept! You would see him wandering around the plant at 3 in the morning. He operated by taking naps, maybe 4 or 5 naps in a 24-hour period. He would take 20-40 minute naps, then he’d be up and going again. His office was right off the engineering department, and the only thing in that office was a couch. Wherever he went in his company there were couches like that. He’d go in there, shut the door, lay down, take a little nap. That’s the way he lived. His bodyguard would stand right outside the door.

We had a weird place in Wichita, too. It was the only aircraft plant I ever worked in that had a barbershop. Bill felt that your hair grew on company time, so it should be cut on company time! (laughs) You could call down there, get an appointment, and get a hell of a nice haircut. The other thing we had was a kitchen. It was a walled-in area right in the middle of the building. You could go in there 24 hours a day and you’d find a nice big kitchen with 4-5 tables, and everything you’d find in a kitchen: stove, sink, refrigerator, freezer, oven, the whole works. Completely stocked. Dishes, food, anything you’d want. It was all free.

After we got all the problems solved, got the thing up and running, Bill lost interest in the 8-track. He was off on something else. As soon as it was no longer a challenge, he would lose interest in it. From there he got into the steam cars out in Nevada, using "Learium," the magic thermal conversion fluid for the Lear Steam Car (laughs). The final thing he got into right before he died was "The Pusher," a Canard-type of aircraft. It was supposed to be most high performance, fuel-efficient aircraft around. He thought he could do the Learjet all over again. That’s when Sam and Moya got together, and there were a lot of bitter feelings about that. That’s what her book (Bill and Me) is about.

So his concept was just to live there at the company, a self-contained little city, no need to leave!

That’s the way he operated, and he expected his people to do the same. I remember one time we worked 36 hours straight. We slept on desks. Plus we ran on a shoestring budget. I took two pay reductions because there wasn’t enough money to pay everyone. We used to have joke there that when the paychecks would arrive, everybody’d leave and get them cashed while they were still good!

I remember once I called up Goodyear in Akron, Ohio. I was inquiring about a new rubber compound that they’d come up with. I told them that I was Frank Schmidt from Lear Jet, and then there was a big silence. Then the guy went ballistic! "You S.O.B.! When are you going to pay for those 56 tires!" It turned out that we’d stiffed him on a bunch of tires for the jets!

You’ve talked about having some lean times at Lear, but once the 8-track took off and was successful, did your division get profitable? Was it considered successful?

I don’t know. I don’t think that most of the money was never made in the machines, but in the rights. We developed all the standards, so anyone who wanted to make tapes or players had to buy our license. It was a gold mine.

When the first tapes came out, were they only on RCA?

Yes, to start with, because we worked with RCA in Indianapolis. I delivered thousands of cartridge parts to them. I spent a lot of time at their recording facilities.

So eventually all the record labels wanted in on it?

That’s right. That’s where you get the proliferation of different 8-track cartridge design.

Well, among 8-track hobbyists, there’s a lot of discussion on how to open various cartridge designs. Some of them look like they were never designed to be opened!

That’s right. The original design had pins to lock it together. Later on we added those little tabs so you could separate the top and bottom. Otherwise you’d end up destroying them.

You basically have to drill out the pins.

That’s right. You have to realize that at the time it was a commercial consumer product; we didn’t see any long life on a cartridge. We tried to make it as best we could, as attractive as we could and as simple as we could. We figured they would have the same life an LP record.

Frank, in your opinion, was the 8-track far more sucessful than you imagined than it would be?

I loved that product and I will always feel it got short changed. If we had been 5 years earlier it would have made it big. The Phillips work on the 1/8 inch. tape cassettes made for a lot simpler transport system, which was cheaper to build and more compact in design. We just were at the wrong time, the electronics revolution, miniature parts, first simple chips, that's what
did it in. In a couple of short years it was history. Yes, we got screwed.

What fried me was the issue of Time several months ago that listed the 100 worse ideas in the last 100 years. The 8-track tape was number 20 I think!

There are a surprisingly large number of people that are into 8-tracks nowadays.

I gathered that from your web site and from eBay.

Well, around 10 years ago I don’t thing anyone would have dreamed that there would be any interest in them again.

It’s gotten me to that point where I’m interested again! I have one of the first production units that’s never been installed. I’m thinking about putting it in my Toyota.

Frank, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I’ve really enjoyed this.

Well, it was an interesting part of my life. I was there for 3 ½ years. My contemporaries today kind of take it out on me, they’ll announce that I’m one of the founders of the 8-track stereo! I’ll tell you one thing; I’d do it all over again.

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