I never met Kurtz personally but I owe a lot to that language for the access to virtually limitless creativity that computers and computer programming have offered. My life would be very different if I didn't have the opportunity that the language provided, especially because it is both approachable and (somewhat) capable.
Sure, it's not the best language for large scale or complex efforts, but it was enough for a child to be able to build text adventures and blit pixels to the screen (it would be another decade before I found out that INT was about interrupt, not integers). Then, as a teenager fooling around with writing games for the class calculators in TI-BASIC, even though that's a bit farther down the language family tree, that also had a positive impact on my growth as a developer and it was the first of many "same but different" experiences that you so often get in the realm of programming. I was also quite fortunate, that launched an early game dev career for me.
To be honest, I wouldn't have recognized the name Thomas E. Kurtz before yesterday, but my mind will light up with dozens of fond memories at the mention of BASIC. I'm not surprised that he was so involved in instructional computing (but I am surprised I never looked into the author(s) of BASIC before, a little ashamed, but I'll remember his name). I actually still have the same Atari 800XL from my childhood and I'll think of him when I see it now.