“The Texas-born songwriter met his longtime lyricist Tom Jones when they were both students at the University of Texas/Austin in the late 1940s, and over the course of a career that spanned nearly the next half-century, Mr. Schmidt never wrote with anyone else.” Their most famous show, The Fantasticks, had the longest run of any play in American history: 17,162 performances over nearly 42 years in a small off-Broadway theater.