Word: bloch
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...were not for a tightfisted great-aunt, Henry Bloch is convinced he would be just another Kansas City stockbroker today. The rich spinster rebuffed the ex-serviceman's plea in 1946 for a $50,000 loan to launch a large company that would sell office services to small businesses; she only lent him $5,000, Had she been more openhearted, Henry Bloch believes, he and his brother Richard would have started too grandly and quickly gone broke...
This season, more than 10 million taxpayers will go to H. & R. Block with all the gusto of visiting the dentist. So it is rather appropriate that Henry Bloch, 56, the chief executive and prime-time TV pitchman, looks like a small-town tooth driller. He is a direct, plain-spoken Midwesterner in a brown suit and brown shoes, the type of fellow for whom the word unpretentious was invented. For his prodigious charities and civic good works, fellow citizens named him Mr. Kansas City, but he hides most of his trophies and awards in a small, dark closet...
More than anybody else, Bloch knows the mood of Americans as the ides of April draw near. The 8,445 H. &R. Block offices and storefronts become confessionals, in which Americans pour out their complaints, fears and frustrations (for an average fee of $25) to the company's approximately 50,000 moonlighting teachers, accountants and other tax preparers...
...Bloch's battalions tell him that tax tensions run high. "Talk of tax revolt has been grossly overstated," says he, "but it probably wouldn't take too much to trigger some type of rebellion." He frets that a demagogue may catch the public fancy by thundering for reducing taxes without reducing spending...
...Bloch's unconventional theories are quite likely to raise a few hobgoblins of their own among her colleagues. One reason: they run counter to a central doctrine of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex. In Bloch's reworking of that Freudian gospel, the kids are attracted to a parent, not out of the incestuous impulses postulated by Freud, but as a sexual strategy to gain control over a threatening parent. One needs only to return to the original Greek myth for proof of her infanticide theory, says Bloch. Unfortunately, she adds, the master apparently missed the key point: the young...