His death, in hospice care, was announced by the company on its website. He was a lifelong resident of Kansas City.
After eight years of nearly profitless struggle, 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 1 in every 6 U.S. returns.
In the process, they not only essentially created an industry but were also among the nation’s franchising pioneers, with thousands of H&R; Block offices springing up across the United States and abroad.
For decades, H&R; Block’s TV commercials became tax-season fixtures, often featuring the soberly attired, gray-haired Henry Bloch as chief pitchman.
“Don’t face the tax laws alone,” he said after one particularly intimidating Washington tax-code overhaul. “Our people will get you the maximum refund you’re entitled to.” (A frequent catchphrase was “What can we find for you?”)
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 Co. in a storeroom office that they rented for $50 a month.
The brothers soon landed bookkeeping jobs for small accounts, including a hamburger stand. But growth was slow, and Leon left to return to law school.
Henry, however, held on and took out a help-wanted ad to find someone to replace his brother. It drew a response from his mother, who 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. The Blochs eventually organized a tax-specialist firm to replace United Business and named it H&R; Block (using their first initials but turning the “h” in their surname into a “k,” for fear that the firm might otherwise be mispronounced as “H&R; Blotch”).
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.
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.