Robert D. Hershey Jr.

His daughter Lisa Phillips confirmed the death.

Phillips presided over a vast expansion of the influence and reach of The Journal, which had been a thin financially focused paper with a circulation of about 100,000 when he joined it in 1947. It would ride a wave of postwar prosperity to become the nation’s largest newspaper, covering national, international and cultural news as well as business and economic affairs.

By the time Phillips retired in 1991, The Journal had not only moved well past its days of strict association with big business; it had also begun opening up what his successor, Peter R. Kann, called a “pretty hidebound” culture with respect to women and minorities in its workforce.

During Phillips’ tenure, profits soared, Asian and European editions were introduced, and Dow Jones book publishing and cable television ventures were launched. The company also pioneered the use of satellites to transmit news copy to distant printing plants.

Slim, mustachioed and self-effacing, Phillips was highly disciplined and a fierce competitor who honored the basic course set by his predecessor, Bernard Kilgore. Kilgore, a commanding personality who was known as Barney, had created the modern Wall Street Journal and ran it for more than 25 years, until his death at 59 in 1967.

“I characterize myself as less of an innovator than a cheerleader and encourager,” Phillips said in an interview for this obituary in 2012 at his home in Bridgehampton.

For all his achievements, though, it was under his command that the company planted the seeds of a business disaster.

In 1985, Dow Jones took a 32% stake in Telerate, a major supplier of real-time market data. The profits were initially handsome enough that Dow Jones decided to acquire the rest of the company in 1990.

But Bloomberg and Reuters, possessing greater electronic savvy, quickly surged ahead as suppliers of such data, and Dow Jones was forced to sell Telerate in 1998 at a huge loss, producing what one analyst called “the mother of all write-downs”: more than $920 million (the equivalent of about $1.4 billion today).

The reversal weakened Dow Jones and, many believe, left the company vulnerable to its eventual acquisition from the Bancroft family by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

Though Phillips retired before Dow Jones unloaded Telerate, he accepted some responsibility for the debacle. “I can be faulted,” he said, “for not realizing if it’s not a business you know, it’s very tough” to succeed.

Warren Henry Phillips was born in Brooklyn on June 28, 1926, to Abraham and Juliette (Rosenberg) Phillips. He soon became a “skinny, timid, unathletic Jewish kid,” as he described himself in a memoir.

His father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe born Abram Figowski, was a salesman for a lingerie manufacturer and later started his own lingerie company. Warren’s mother had been a clerk in the New York public school system before marrying.

Warren developed a passion for newspapers when his father took him on a tour of The Daily News’ building on East 42nd Street in Manhattan. At age 12, he started his own newspaper at his home.

He graduated from Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn just shy of his 15th birthday and was deemed too young for college. So he spent a year at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx.

He then prepared to attend Oberlin College in Ohio — of some 15 colleges he had applied to, it was the only one that accepted him — but before he could enroll, his father died suddenly at 47, and Warren turned to tuition-free Queens College. He commuted there from Brooklyn by bus.

After interrupting his studies for a stint in the Army during World War II, he came back to New York and took a $16-a-week job as a copy boy at The New York Herald Tribune. Resuming classes at Queens College, he subsequently became campus correspondent for both The Tribune and The New York Times.

Approaching graduation, he applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, only to be turned down. (Many years later he was elected to the university’s board.)

It was then that he went to work for The Wall Street Journal, first as a proofreader and then as a copy editor. He did not stay long, however; deciding that it was time to see Europe, he quit The Journal for a civilian job, as a night-shift copy editor, on the military newspaper The Stars and Stripes at its offices south of Frankfurt, Germany.

There, encouraged by The Journal’s Page 1 editor, he began submitting feature articles to The Journal as a freelancer. Before long he was hired to fill a vacancy as German correspondent.

“That was a great milestone for me,” Phillips recalled. He went on to report from throughout postwar Europe and was appointed London bureau chief at age 23 after his predecessor’s sudden death.

It was in London that he met Barbara Ann Thomas. They married in 1951. And it was during his London tour that Phillips, who in 1948 had cast his first presidential vote for the Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas, abandoned the liberal views he had acquired growing up. He was “transformed,” as he put it, into a conservative on economics and foreign policy after the democratic socialist Labour Party unseated Winston Churchill in 1945.

“I had a chance to observe a socialist government in action close up,” he recounted in the memoir, “Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal” (2012). “I became convinced that a few individuals, however wise, pressing the buttons and pulling the levers to try to direct and shape an economy, were no match for the way things worked in a free market, in response to the buying, investing and saving decisions of millions of individuals.”

This experience, Phillips said in the 2012 interview, “made me comfortable with The Journal’s traditional editorial policy.”

Over the years he agreed with most of the paper’s conservative editorial positions, he said, though he sometimes softened the more strident ones under Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor, whom Phillips was largely responsible for appointing. Bartley held that post for more than 30 years.

In appointing Bartley, Phillips skipped over some senior editorial writers and provoked strong opposition in the paper’s Washington bureau, where some considered Bartley an ideological zealot.

Phillips was fond of saying that he never had to leave the house to learn the liberal reaction to The Journal’s opinions. Referring to his wife, he said in the interview, “She never gives me a moment’s rest about The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.”

Returning home after three years in London, Phillips was sent to Chicago to be manager editor of The Journal’s Midwest edition. He later rose through the newsroom and corporate ranks, serving as managing editor, executive editor and general manager before becoming publisher of The Journal and chairman and chief executive of Dow Jones in 1975.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife; two other daughters, Leslie Phillips and Nina Phillips; and four grandchildren. A brief early marriage, to Judith Greenwald, ended in annulment.

After Phillips retired in 1991, he and his wife started Bridge Works Publishing Co., an independent business that achieved considerable success. After publishing more than 100 titles — some by first-time authors like Tom Perrotta — the couple sold the company in 2000 but continued to run it.

In the 2012 interview, Phillips said he had never regretted the sale of Dow Jones to Murdoch, which many had feared would be The Journal’s ruination. He said he had not been confident that the Bancroft family would have had the means or the interest to sustain The Journal through the newspaper industry’s decline.

In fact, he said at the time, he considered The Journal better than ever after five years under Murdoch. “There is no sign to date that its integrity has been compromised,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/obituaries/warren-h-phillips-dead.html" id="ffc2ab68-53d9-3a40-aa49-79b7411ccaba">The New York Times</a>.

Warren H. Phillips, who started at The Wall Street Journal as a $40-a-week proofreader and then vaulted through the ranks to become its publisher and the chief executive of its parent, Dow Jones &amp; Co., died Friday at his home in Bridgehampton, New York. He was 92.

Warren H. Phillips, Longtime Wall Street Journal Publisher, Dies at 92

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&amp;R; Block offices springing up across the United States and abroad.

For decades, H&amp;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&amp;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&amp;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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/obituaries/henry-w-bloch-dead.html" id="9c311017-6eb3-37ac-a33a-f449d05e761d">The New York Times</a>.

Henry W. Bloch, who founded the tax preparation company H&amp;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 Tuesday in Kansas City, Missouri. He was 96.

Henry W. Bloch, Pioneer of Tax Preparation, Is Dead at 96

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and served as a B-17 navigator, flying 31 combat missions over Germany, three over Berlin, and winning the Air Medal and three oak leaf clusters. The Army later sent him to the Harvard Business School to study statistics.

But by then he had been nurturing entrepreneurial ambitions. “My brothers and I were always thinking up different businesses we could start,” he once recalled, “but none of them felt right.”

A turning point came when he read the transcript of a speech by the noted economist Sumner H. Slichter, who taught at Harvard, arguing for the importance of the small business sector to the health of the postwar American economy.

Bloch soon envisioned one day starting a firm that would supply a broad menu of financial services to small businesses, including accounting, bill collection, temporary employment and tax preparation — notwithstanding the fact that he had taken only one semester of accounting in college. “I just hated it,” he said.

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 great-aunt was Kate Wollman, who lived in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and had donated the Wollman ice-skating rink in Central Park, later refurbished by Donald Trump, to the city.)

By 1954, Hank and Dick Bloch had built a thriving 12-employee business in bookkeeping. Tax preparation was provided mostly as a courtesy to a few customers and friends, but it produced so little revenue that the brothers decided to discontinue it just before the 1955 tax season, when they were already working seven days a week. They alerted The Kansas City Star, where the brothers had been advertising their services.

But an ad salesman there had a different thought: Instead of abandoning tax preparation, he said, promote it. The brothers agreed, and took out a small ad depicting a man behind an eight-ball. “Taxes, $5,” the headline read.

The first day the ad ran, in late January 1955, it touched off a near stampede. Henry had been out visiting clients at the time when his brother called him. “Hank, get back here as quick as you can!” Richard said. “We’ve got an office full of people.”

Not only had taxpayers recently received their W-2 forms; the brothers also subsequently learned that the Internal Revenue Service was in the process of ending its long-standing practice of preparing tax returns free of charge. The service in Kansas City had just been halted.

Henry and Richard promptly organized a tax-specialist firm to replace United Business and named it H&amp;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&amp;R; Blotch”).

It flourished, generating more than $20,000 (almost $200,000 in today’s dollars) within weeks — nearly a third of what United Business had been earning annually. The firm was also aided by the IRS’s decision to discontinue free tax preparation in New York City, leading the Bloch brothers to open seven offices there in 1956.

To oversee the New York operation, the brothers would spend alternate two-week shifts in the city while renting a house in suburban Scarsdale, New York.

That arrangement, however, separated them unduly from their families and put a strain on their ability to supervise the entire enterprise. The brothers soon put the New York business on the market and found two accountants who wanted to buy it.

But when the prospective purchasers could not meet the Blochs’ asking price, negotiations led to a fee and royalty agreement in 1957, launching what became the firm’s franchise network.

In 1962, with Block offices numbering 206, the company made an initial public offering of its shares: 75,000 at $4 each, or about $34 today. (It was trading at $26.44 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.)

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. A particular beneficiary was the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where the School of Business and Public Administration and the School of Management bear his name. His brother Leon also gave money to the university for a law library, which is named after him.

H&amp;R; Block, as a diversified financial services company, lost some its luster after 2000, when Henry stepped down as chairman and retired (though he remained as an active unofficial overseer). It suffered heavy losses in the mortgage market in the 2000s and from lawsuits alleging that it had taken advantage of poor people in extending loans in anticipation of tax refunds. It was also forced to restate earnings to correct accounting errors in its own tax returns.

Henry was succeeded by series of chief executives from outside the Bloch family. The current president and chief executive is Jeff Jones.

In recent years, Block has been challenged by new competitors and has closed thousands of offices with the rise of online do-it-yourself tax preparation, though the company has built a solid software business as well.

His son Thomas M. Bloch is the author of “Many Happy Returns: The Story of Henry Bloch, America’s Tax Man” (2011).

Beginning in the 1970s, Henry 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.

“I think the paintings are lonely in our house,” Bloch was quoted as saying in “Many Happy Returns.” “They’ll be much happier in the museum.”

Henry W. Bloch, Tax-Preparation Pioneer (and Pitchman), Is Dead at 96

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Robert D. Hershey Jr.

Articles written by the author

Warren H. Phillips, Longtime Wall Street Journal Publisher, Dies at 92

Henry W. Bloch, Pioneer of Tax Preparation, Is Dead at 96

Henry W. Bloch, Tax-Preparation Pioneer (and Pitchman), Is Dead at 96

Henry W. Bloch, Pioneer of Tax Preparation, Is Dead at 96