Bill Ford said leaving Ford Motor Co.’s world headquarters on Michigan Avenue for a new Ford World Headquarters building about a mile away is emotional for him because there are so many memories he’s created during his years in the current building: the Glass House.
“It’s been our headquarters for 70 years,” Ford said. The company moved into the Glass House in 1956. “I’ve been there my whole career, which is coming up on 50 years now. But it’s time. Its better days are behind it.”
Ford, who is the company’s executive chair and who served as CEO from 2001 to 2006, said he doesn’t attach emotion to a building. Rather, he has feelings and memories of all the experiences he had with the people who worked with him over those five decades in that building.
“When I think about world headquarters, I don’t think about the building, I think about who I interacted with there and what my relationship with people were like there,” Ford said. “I had so many great ones, even the ladies who worked in the dining room, the cleaning people, they were all great people and I remember all of them.”
The company will start moving people into the new headquarters located at Oakwood Boulevard and Village Road this fall.
Ford plans to have most employees out of the Glass House by the second-quarter 2026. Then the company will slowly tear down the Glass House over the next 18 months with most of it gone by the end of 2027 or mid-2028. The company is working with the city of Dearborn to come up with ways to make the green space a park or some other community area, even though Ford will continue to own the property.
Bill Ford said when he sees the building, there are a “zillion” memories. He started out working there in the basement and he said he remembers the ceiling fell in on him one time. Or, there’s the time that he recalls trying to find ways to sneak out of the Glass House without anybody seeing him, noting: “The service elevator became a great friend of mine because nobody ever knew it was there.”
He sat down with a small group of reporters to share his most powerful and personal memories of his time working in the Glass House.
‘You could have heard a pin drop’
Sometime around 2007, at the start of the Great Recession, Ford said then-UAW President Ron Gettelfinger called him asking if he could address the company’s board of directors.
“I thought what the heck? ‘Ron can you give me a little hint?’ He said, ‘Nah, it’s fine,’ ” Ford said.
So Ford agreed to let him come to the meeting and speak. He told the board that Gettelfinger was coming, but he did not know why.
“Well it was great. Ron came in and said, ‘Bill has asked me if I can help the company and will I take the health care obligations on to my balance sheet and off of his. I just want you to know, I love this company, I love this industry and yes, I will do that,’ ” Ford recalled Gettelfinger saying. “You could’ve heard a pin drop in that meeting.”
The UAW and the Detroit Three carmakers struck ground-breaking deals that year in which the union took the burden for pensioners’ health care coverage, which was costing the companies billions of dollars, off the automakers’ books by creating trusts known as VEBAs (voluntary employees’ beneficiary associations).
Ford said most of the directors didn’t know Gettelfinger at the time he came to speak to them, but it was “really a kind of powerful moment that I will always remember. That was a really important moment for me and for the company.”
A memory: ‘I wouldn’t trade … for anything’
It is the friendships made there that Ford said stick with him, such as the time spent with Roberto Goizueta, the former CEO of Coca-Cola and a director on Ford’s board of directors.
“He was an unbelievable mentor to me and all of my time with Roberto was at world headquarters,” Ford said.
He recalled another powerful memory from 1982 when Ford was in negotiations with the UAW for a new union contract. Bill Ford was “a pretty young man at the company and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing — not sure I still do — but certainly didn’t back then.”
One of his first meetings during the UAW negotiating session took place in a big conference room with a long table that had about 30 people on each side of it. Ford, then a junior member of the team, was seated against a back wall.
One of the UAW negotiators who was “an old, old guy” stood up and pointed directly at Ford.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh God.’ He said, ‘You! What are you made of?’ ” Ford said. “At that point, I’m looking for a place to hide. I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He said, ‘I knew your great-grandfather, I knew your grandfather and I knew your uncle and I knew what they were made of. What the hell are you made of?’ “
Ford’s great-grandfather is Henry Ford. His grandfather was Edsel Ford and his uncle was Henry Ford II.
“I thought, ‘Oh boy.’ I stood up and I said, ‘Well, you’re more fortunate than I because I didn’t know my grandfather or my great-grandfather, but I know what they stood for and blah blah blah.’ “
The finger pointing and questioning by UAW negotiators on Bill Ford went on for a week, he said. Then one evening, he was walking down the hallway inside the Glass House and “I see four of these guys coming at me and I’m looking for a men’s room to dive into and they said, ‘Hey! What are you doing? You want to go have a beer?’ I’m looking around to see who they’re talking to and I said, ‘Me?’ They said, ‘Yeah, you passed the test, you were great.’ “
Ford joined the men at nearby Miller’s Bar for a beer and they all became great friends, he said.
“I’ll remember that,” Ford said. “That was an interesting baptism by fire at world headquarters and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Bill Ford’s memories in the Glass House includes one when ‘you could’ve heard a pin drop’
Reporting by Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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