In Memory of Louis H. Henzi

March 20, 1934 – June 12, 2026

When people ask about The Henzi Foundation, they sometimes assume it's named after me. I'm proud of what we've built together — but the name belongs to him.

Louis H. Henzi — my grandfather — passed away peacefully on June 12, 2026, at the age of 92, in Dillsboro, Indiana. He was a chemist, a Cold Warrior, a man of fierce integrity, a Swiss-proud Cincinnatian, and the reason this family carries a name worth honoring.

A Life Built on Precision

Louis was born in Cincinnati on March 20, 1934, and grew up in the Camp Washington neighborhood during the Depression and the second World War. He came from a line of Swiss-German immigrants — a heritage he carried with pride and a certain dry humor. He loved to tell the story of Swiss craftsmen who, challenged on their precision by rivals, simply drilled a hole straight through the other side's "smallest screw." That was Grandpa: quiet about it, but always two moves ahead.

He started at the University of Cincinnati — proudly. UC denied him in-state tuition because he lived just outside the city line. He paid out-of-pocket anyway, earned his degree, and when UC came calling for donations later, the answer was a firm no. Then he went to work at the Fernald site — more on that below — and afterward earned his MBA from Xavier University. Xavier had refused him a discount too. They still mailed him every year for a donation. Every year, the answer was the same: you didn't help me get started. He wasn't a grudge-holder — he volunteered with Rachel, fed the poor, gave generously of his time. He simply didn't reward institutions that hadn't shown up for him. There's a difference, and he knew it.

That same sense of justice extended further. When Cincinnati Police Officer Melvin "Mel" Henze — a relative, a Vietnam veteran — was shot and killed in the line of duty in May 1979 at just 28 years old, Grandpa carried it. Mel's death shook the city and ultimately led to Cincinnati officers being issued bulletproof vests. Grandpa supported the family and fought to keep the killer in prison — until he met the killer's family. He realized we're all connected, that their suffering wasn't justice either, and he found a way to forgive. As we all should. He backed the blue without irony or asterisk — and in the same breath reminded us: they better have a warrant. He wanted a just society, full stop. Support for law enforcement and insistence on its accountability weren't in tension for him. They were the same thing.

He eventually settled into a role as a QA Lead at the Drackett Company — the Cincinnati company behind Windex, Drano, Renuzit, and Glade — where he spent nearly three decades. He didn't just develop products; he fought for them. He liked to tell the story himself: in a conference room, when management pushed to cut costs on a Renuzit scent formula, he ran the demonstration on the spot — proving that no one in the room could even smell what they were about to sell. He held the line. That was the job, as far as he was concerned.

His team's work contributed to what became one of the most significant transactions in consumer products history — the Drackett acquisition for $1.15 billion in 1992 (worth roughly $2.7 billion today). During those years he traveled, held talks, joined seminars, and guided teams — often through places like Urbana and Springfield, Ohio, places he came to know well. The one story he liked to mention from those years: he once met Jimmy Durante. That was his claim to coolness.

The Cold War, Classified

Before Drackett, there was another chapter — one he kept mostly quiet about. Grandpa worked on the United States' nuclear program at the National Lead Company, which operated the Fernald site northwest of Cincinnati during the height of the Cold War. The work was classified. Serious enough that he and his lab partner once had to stand before Military Police, sign away their rights, just to reference a scientific paper they had written themselves.

He joked for decades that the research had left him "radioactive" — that he'd glow green, his lab partner orange. The two of them leaned into it. Over the occasional dinners the families shared together, they'd spin out these elaborate sitcom scenarios: one sneaking into the wrong room in the dark, being revealed by the glow. The wives, the mistaken identities, the timing. They had a whole bit. That kind of humor was how men of that era carried things they couldn't talk about.

He also carpooled to that facility from Cincinnati. On one morning commute, he casually asked a coworker what was on the agenda. The coworker said he had some barrels of plutonium to dispose of and planned to fire an MP's M16 into them until they exploded. Grandpa was absolutely horrified. The story captures something essential about him: he was a man who took safety and responsibility seriously in a world that often didn't.

The Computer That Came With the Carpet

He was also, quietly, a pioneer.

In 1982, Louis and my grandmother Shirley bought new carpet for the house. The deal came with something unexpected: a TI-99/4A home computer. Most families in America didn't have one. He brought it home anyway, and it stayed.

He didn't stop there. A Tandy 1000 followed, and then a later IBM-compatible PC. His digital life wasn't limited to home, either — at Drackett, he was using the original Compaq computers, those iconic machines that were enormous by today's standards but were considered microcomputers at the time, small enough to be a revelation. He understood what these things were becoming before most people did.

From the beginning, computers meant playing together. On the TI it was A-Maze-Ing and writing programs in BASIC. Later he took me to local computer stores and bought me Doom and Wolfenstein — he thought it was cool, even if he found it a little gruesome. He already knew the BBS world, modems, what it meant to be "online" in that sense. But when the actual internet arrived — TCP/IP, the real thing — that wasn't native to anything. You needed books. You needed disks. He sat down with me and we worked through it together, getting Mosaic running, getting the stack configured, figuring out how to actually connect. It led to NNTP, to email, to everything that followed.

What came next, I'll never forget. Dialing directly into the ISP's bulletin board. The sounds of the modem handshake. Pulling down Netscape over Zmodem — watching that progress bar inch forward, 54 minutes in, 90% complete. Then the line clicked. Uncle Lou had been trying to reach Grandpa, couldn't get through, and did an emergency operator break-in. The download died. We had to start over.

That's how people learned pretty quickly that Joe would tie up the phone lines at night. It was the first version of Netscape available for Windows. We just didn't know yet what we were holding.

Grandma Shirley took to it immediately. She became one of the first people online doing genealogy research — emailing, digging, building family trees at a time when almost no one else was doing it that way. She eventually handed those trees down to her granddaughters. Grandpa made all of it possible. If you log into any of the long-running genealogy sites today, it's her family history that goes back forever — and it's her relatives who carried that work forward, enabled by him.

And me — I took the access he gave me and used his office and his machines to build what became the first web page for Walnut Hills High School. No domain. We hosted it at uc.edu/~whhs as a real Unix user. That page, that connection, that household — it's why I'm here, doing this, with a foundation that has its own corner of the internet because a man bought carpet in 1982 and brought home a computer with it.

The Gathering Place

Growing up as his grandchild in the 1980s was something I know firsthand — his home was my home too, in the way that really matters. It was where I romped with my cousins, where we watched movies while Grandma and Grandpa kept watch over the whole wonderful mess of us. He took us on trips. I got to travel with him — and what I learned wasn't about where we were going. It was how to check into a hotel, where to put your things, how to carry yourself while doing it all. The kind of thing you can only learn by watching someone who already knows.

His house was also the center of everything during the holidays. Every gathering, every generation, eventually ended up around that table. The dining room alone has seen it all — games of Trivial Pursuit that got competitive, tension that occasionally spilled over, falls, fights that in hindsight were funnier than they felt at the time, and some of the most genuinely joyful family moments I've ever been part of. So many jokes told. So many laughs. Entire generations seated together, sharing a meal he and Grandma made possible just by being the kind of people everyone wanted to be around.

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s he welcomed more granddaughters, and eventually great-grandchildren began arriving too. Later, after Grandma died, he liked his solitude — anyone who knew him knew that — but he also made a point of showing up. Regular trips, special visits, the effort to go see people. And there isn't a person in this family who he wouldn't help, if they were brave enough to ask.

What He Passed Down

His great-grandson Ethan — my son, born in January 2009 — is pursuing chemistry. Grandpa saw it coming. Even in the final years, when severe memory loss had taken so much from him, that bond held. There was a moment at Christmas, when Grandpa hadn't recognized Ethan at first — his hair was long, things were hazy — and he had already told us he couldn't remember working a single day of his entire life. Then, out of nowhere, he looked at Ethan and asked, quietly: "Your birthday's in January, isn't it?"

It stopped the room.

He didn't just inspire from a distance. When I was struggling to finish school, he sat down with me in the kitchen and taught me chemistry — proper chemistry, with alcohol burners standing in for the bunsen burner he didn't have. Patient, precise, exactly as you'd expect from a man who spent decades demanding that things be done right.

And then there's Sadie. She came in interested in teeth, but she became a chemist — and there's no question in the family about why. She adored him. She once said he was the smartest person she'd ever known. Coming from her, that means something.

Why This Foundation Carries His Name

We help families who have lost a child cover funeral expenses — because no parent should face that kind of loss and also face that kind of bill. We chose the name Henzi Foundation because we wanted to build something that reflected what that name meant to us.

It meant holding the line when it would have been easier not to. It meant precision and integrity. It meant bringing the future home and sharing it with your family. It meant caring about the safety and dignity of the people around you, even when no one else was watching.

That's who Louis H. Henzi was.

I'm proud to be a Henzi because of him.

And I'm proud to be Swiss. My wifi network has been named Helvetica since wifi was invented. He would have appreciated that.

A Living Memorial

We don't have the full story — no one does. There are chapters we never got to ask about, stories that went quiet with him on June 12th. But what we do have, we're building into something lasting.

I had the chance to talk with him about what comes next for this foundation. Beyond The Frankie Fund, the goal is to one day establish The Louis and Shirley Child Health and Safety Fund — an extension of this work that honors them both by name. To many people, they seemed anxious. They weren't. They simply cared about all of us, deeply and without limit. We just had a way of making them worry.

louis.henzi.org is a living site dedicated to his memory — a place where the family can continue to fill in the timeline, share stories, and make sure the people who come after us know who he was.

If you knew Louis, or if you're a Henzi finding your way here — we'd love to hear from you there.

Louis H. Henzi is survived by his children Deborah, Rachel, and Louis Jr., his grandchildren, and a generation of great-grandchildren who carry his name and his curiosity forward. He is buried alongside his wife, Shirley, at Spring Grove Cemetery.