Henry W Bloch

Henry W. Bloch, who founded the tax preparation company H & R Block with his brother and was its folksy pitchman in television commercials for decades, helping to establish it as one of the most recognizable brands in American business, died on Tuesday in Kansas City, Mo. He was 96. Mr. Bloch co-founded H&R Bloch, a tax-services and banking company. in Kansas City, Mo. Henry and Richard Bloch’s company began thriving in the mid-1950s as they transformed a tiny bookkeeping operation in Kansas City into the nation’s dominant income-tax concern, preparing at its peak one in every six United States returns. Henry Wollman Bloch was born in Kansas City on July 30, 1922, the middle son of Leon E. Bloch and Hortense (Bienenstok) Bloch, who was known as Horty. His father was a prominent lawyer in the city; his mother was a homemaker who read philosophy avidly and whose ancestors were among the first to settle Kansas. Henry graduated from the University of Michigan in 1944. At 24, after a brief stint as a stockbroker and with $5,000 borrowed from a great-aunt in New York City, he and his older brother, Leon Jr., established the United Business Company in a storeroom office that they rented for $50 a month. But growth was slow, and Leon left to return to law school. His mother suggested that he team up with his younger brother, Richard, a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1954, Hank and Dick Bloch had built a thriving 12-employee business in bookkeeping. Then the Internal Revenue Service was in the process of ending its longstanding practice of preparing tax returns free of charge. The company says it now has about 12,000 tax offices in the United States and other countries and had annual revenues of more than $3.1 billion in fiscal 2018, when it prepared 23 million tax returns worldwide. Mr. Bloch, who had once been barred from a Kansas City country club because he was Jewish, became a wealthy man and eventually a philanthropist in his native state. Mr. Bloch pledged $32-million, of which $7-million has been paid, to the University of Missouri at Kansas City Foundation, for a new building in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management. Beginning in the 1970s, Mr. Bloch and his wife became avid art collectors, amassing a collection of two dozen Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings by, among others, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Bonnard, Seurat, Pissarro, Matisse and Monet. He had said that all would eventually go to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Richard retired in 1971 to support research and education on cancer. He had survived lung cancer, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, and then colon cancer. He sold his interest in the company in 1982 and died of heart failure in 2004 at 78. Leon died at 91 in 2012. Henry’s wife, Marion, died in 2013 after a 25-year struggle with brain cancer. He is survived by two daughters, Mary Jo Brown and Elizabeth Uhlmann; two sons, Robert and Thomas; 12 grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren.