RARE IMAGE “H&R Bloch\" Henry W. Bloch Hand Signed 5X7 Color Photo Dated 2010 For Sale

Up for sale "H&R Bloch" Henry W. Bloch Hand Signed 5X7 Color Photo.

ES-6990

Henry

Wollman Bloch (July 30, 1922 –

April 23, 2019) was an American businessman and philanthropist. He was the

co-founder and (since 2000)] the chairman emeritus of Block. Henry and his brother, Richard Bloch, founded H&R Block in 1955 in Kansas City, Missouri. Bloch

was born to a Jewish family in Kansas City on July 30, 1922, the son of

Hortense (Bienenstock) and Leon Bloch. He attended Southwest High School,

and was an undergraduate at University of

Missouri–Kansas City. He later attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, graduating in 1944. He was initiated as a brother

of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity's

Phi chapter at the University of Michigan in 1940. Through the U.S. Army Air Corps he

received graduate training at the Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1945, following World War II, Bloch and his brother Leon founded United

Business Company, joined later by his brother Richard in 1946 after Leon left

to pursue a law degree. The company provided bookkeeping and tax preparation

services in Kansas City, then expanded tax preparation services after a

successful advertising campaign in the Kansas City Star and the Internal Revenue Service decision

to phase out free preparation services. Bloch officially founded the H&R Block company with his brother Richard in 1955.

As Henry often explained in interviews, the misspelling in their

corporate name of their surname was to reflect their family's proper

pronunciation, as opposed to "blahch" or "blowch". By 1962,

H&R Block became a public company, and in 2019, there are more than 12,000

H&R Block offices. Bloch himself became a fixture for many years

in television ads, delivering slogans like "Don't face the laws

alone."