Ingram's May 2024

McDonnell (founded: 1898) and Black & Veatch (1915) were positioning themselves to become national, then global, players in engineering and design, especially for large infrastructure projects. Hallmark, founded in 1910 by J.C. Hall—he was yet to turn 20 years old—had by the mid-1970s asserted its claim to being the world’s leader in production of greeting cards. More than that, it changed Kansas City as a center of excellence for the creative class, generating thousands of jobs as adja cent industries and companies employed the artists and production staff to keep the presses rolling. On the hospitality front, Arthur Bryant was already 30 years into his ownership of the barbecue restaurant that bore his name and made Kansas City-style smoked meats a standard by which the nation would judge those delicacies. In tandem with the growth in Bryant’s success, young Ollie Gates was achieving fame in his own right as a com petitor, furthering the city’s reputation and spawning dozens of imitators and competi tors that continue to make this city the first name in American barbecue. Barnett Helzberg, meanwhile, was com ing down the back stretch of a career that had seen him go national with the jewelry concept launched by his grandfather in the early 20th century. Nearly 30 years after selling Helzberg Diamonds to Warren Buf fet, that brand continues to resonate with the American public. On the financial-services front, Henry and Richard Bloch were 20 years into their leadership of the accounting firm-turned tax specialist. Just seven years after they founded H&R Block in 1955, the company went public—and their transformation of the tax-filing process stands as yet another instance of how the Kansas City entrepre neurial spirit could produce change on a global scale. All of that had been set in place well before Outlook ’s first edition hit the press es, and all of it had helped inspire Ludwell Gaines to begin chronicling the region’s business success with a monthly publication that had no peer. Over the past half-century, Kansas City has seen some spectacular corporate suc cesses, with institutions that have formed and taken on global dimensions. Others have become the biggest and the best of what the business infrastructure here has to offer, only to be swept up by larger global

Brother Act: Richard, left, and Henry Bloch turned their small accounting office into a global enterprise, and the first name in U.S. tax-preparation services.

players with bottomless pockets and seem ingly insatiable appetites for acquisition. The bottom line: Kansas City contin ues to boast a powerful roster of historical business figures who, at various levels, have built on the legacy gifted to them to cast their influence across regional commerce and, in some cases, around the planet. Let’s take a look at some of the major en trepreneurial figures from the past half-cen tury by decade. To know their names is to appreciate what they left behind to inspire the entrepreneurs of the next 50 years—and beyond. The 1970s, of course, belonged to a pair of visionaries who, by separate paths, came to set the foundation for fans of profes sional sports here. Ewing Kauffman

City. But his influence did not end on the field. Hunt Midwest, the real-estate devel opment firm he created, has become a mon ster in logistics development (and was the original owner of Worlds of Fun). As the 1980s were about to dawn, three executives from the Arthur Andersen ac counting firm penciled out an idea for a health informatics company that could leverage the emerging power of the micro chip. From PGI & Associates (for founders Neal Patterson, Paul Gorup, and Cliff Illig) to its rebrand as Cerner Corp., the health

made his fortune building a phar maceutical company he founded as a one-man entity, then would leverage a fortune made in that field to help Kansas City regain pro-baseball status by founding the Kansas City Royals. In less than a decade, the team would make three runs at the American League pennant, each time bringing to mind the reason why a stage play that debuted in 1955 was ti tled “Damn Yankees.”

Visionary: William T. Kemper was the patriarch of a banking family that produced the region’s two largest enterprises.

Hunt, hailing from a Texas oil family fortune, founded the American Football League in 1960 and three years later moved his team from Dallas to Kansas

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Kansas City’s Business Media

May 2024