His great-grandparents worked for Ford. Now he’s building new HQ
Michael Bonner’s great grandparents worked at Ford’s Rouge plant. Now he’s building the new world headquarters in Dearborn.
- Mike Bonner is project executive for building company Barton Malow, which is constructing the nearly all-glass, oval-shaped building that sits in a campus Ford dubs its ‘Hub.’
- Multigenerations of Bonner’s family have worked at Ford properties.
It’s a warm, sunny October afternoon and Mike Bonner puts on his bright green and orange construction vest and hard hat to walk nearly half a mile from a construction trailer to his main work site.
He is calm and confident despite being the guy responsible for arguably one of the biggest jobs in his career that has nearly all eyes in metro Detroit watching. He is in charge of overseeing the entire construction of Ford Motor Co.’s new global headquarters in Dearborn.
“This is my first job for Ford,” Bonner said, a knowing-grin emerging on his face as he considers that irony.
You see Bonner has deep-rooted family ties to the Blue Oval. His family has worked for Ford for nearly a century. Bonner wouldn’t even be standing on the construction site at Oakwood Boulevard and Village roads that afternoon if not for Ford because his grandparents met while they both worked at Ford’s Rouge Assembly plant. They married and had Bonner’s father and aunt.
Bonner, 41, is a project executive for building company Barton Malow, which is constructing the nearly all-glass, oval-shaped, four-story, 2.1-million-square-foot building that sits in a campus Ford dubs its “Hub” directly across from Greenfield Village in the heart of Ford country.
“We just finished our 4 million person-hour mark; we’ve put 4 million hours of work into the job over five years,” Bonner said, as he surveys the front of the building — that will soon be christened as Ford’s new World Headquarters — to ensure construction is going to plan.
The work is personal. His paternal great-grandparents and grandparents all worked at Ford’s Rouge Assembly plant starting in the 1930s. His maternal grandfather worked 41 years at various Ford facilities, spending a lot of time at meetings inside of Ford’s current iconic world headquarters on Michigan Avenue, nicknamed The Glass House. Bonner’s father worked at the Product Development Center — part of which Bonner demolished to make way for the new World Headquarters building.
“Ford has always been there,” Bonner said. “It’s been a huge part of our lives. I would hear stories every day from my dad at the dinner table about what he was doing at work. So much of our livelihood has been in that worker/partnership with Ford one way or another. Growing up, Ford is what put bread on our table. Everywhere you go, you see Ford and that’s just how growing up was and how my life is.”
Bonner said he is sharing that family tie to Ford with his two children, ages 6 and 9, now. He takes them to Greenfield Village, points across the street to the Hub and proudly says, “This is what Dad’s building.”
Following family roots
Bonner’s office sits deep inside Barton Malow’s large construction trailer that holds dozens of managers’ and supervisors’ offices as well as a wide bullpen in the center for team meetings where construction blueprints and progress are routinely reviewed. He said there are about 26 people supporting him there and upward of 800 skilled trades people on the site to ensure the job gets done to specification and on time.
The trailer is a good 5- to 10-minute walk from the front entrance of Ford’s Hub, where about 500 Ford employees work now. Ford plans on populating the building in phases, adding another 500 or so Ford employees next month when it officially christens the building.
Then, Ford will transfer hundreds more employees there next year until the building is finally completed in 2027. It can then house up to 4,000 employees — that’s twice as many as Ford’s iconic Glass House can accommodate. In the meantime, Ford plans to gradually demolish The Glass House and have it gone by the end of 2027 or by mid-2028.
Bonner reviews the construction plans in his office that afternoon. He’s standing next to a large framed photo he hung on the wall of the Edmund Fitzgerald — the famous freighter that sank in Lake Superior in November 1975. The photo, he explains, once hung in the home of his paternal grandparents Robert and Jean (Altounian) Bonner, the two who met when they both worked at Ford’s Rouge factory. When they died, he took the photo for his office as a reminder of his family roots in Ford.
Bonner chose construction rather than a career in the car industry because he followed “different family roots.” His mother was an accountant at Barton Malow and he grew up hearing her work stories, too. So when he went to Michigan State University, unsure of what career path to follow, he took a class in construction management and “ending up loving it.”
“I did an internship with Barton Malow and I’ve been here ever since I was 19,” Bonner said.
He’s mostly led the construction of buildings for the health care industry, but he said, “I’ve always been a Ford person. Every car I’ve ever owned is Ford.”
Bonner drives a 2016 F-150 pickup and despite its age and the 133,000 miles on it, he has no desire to trade it in for a new one, he said.
“The first stock I ever owned, my grandpa gave it to me, was some shares of Ford stock that I still own to this day,” Bonner said. “So coming from a Ford family it gives you a feeling of ownership of the job, or at least you’re in it with the Ford team.”
Keeping a big secret
Bonner took on the Ford project thinking it was just “a very large program” that involved tearing down part of the Product Development Center — the place where his dad, Russell Bonner, worked as an engineer for many years.
But soon Bonner would learn that what he was building was beyond just “a very large program” — it would be the automaker’s new world headquarters.
“Probably about halfway through is when we found out that they were going to be relocating the executives down here and that was all under a (non-disclosure agreement),” Bonner said.
He said the news meant revising the design to accommodate the building’s new swagger.
“Your first thought is, it’s exciting. Your second thought is, ‘OK, this means ratcheting up the level of spotlight on the program,’ ” Bonner said. “But it’s always been a program that’s been under the spotlight for quite a bit just due to the size and scale of it, this just took it to another level where we all had to step up a little bit to really understand what this end product was going to be.”
The harder part was not being allowed to tell his family that this little project they thought he was supervising was actually going to be the company’s new World Headquarters.
But when he did tell them, oh what a reaction.
Grandpa’s revelation
“I was very, very proud when Michael got that assignment,” Don Jesmore told the Detroit Free Press.
Jesmore is Bonner’s maternal grandfather who spent years at the site Bonner works at now, as well as inside Ford’s Glass House, during his 41-year career at Ford.
At 97, Jesmore spends his days golfing (or at least driving the cart) with friends or enjoying life at the Novi retirement community where he lives. But his grandson, Bonner, has driven Jesmore around the new HQ frequently to allow Jesmore to admire the work.
For example, the one-of-a-kind unique brick pattern that has accents of cream brick interwoven with the brown, black and tan bricks all made exclusively for Ford, the Western Red Cedar wood accents around the building and the “frit pattern” on the glass that gives an illusion of straight lines running through all the windows, but is actually thousands of tiny ovals, a nod to the Blue Oval.
“I am very familiar with the buildings that are being replaced, much of (the) engineering center,” Jesmore said. “I spent a lot of time there in my work life.”
Jesmore said he started with Ford in 1952 as an engineer and had many jobs including working in Australia. He finished his career in Dearborn as a vehicle operations manager in charge of all truck and car assembly and manufacturing operations in North America, a big job he held until he retired in 1991.
His office was in a building at I-94 and Oakwood Boulevard, but Jesmore said he spent a lot of time in The Glass House. Jesmore has no melancholy feelings about Ford demolishing the iconic site.
“It’s just a building. The operation and management of the company is far more important than the building they work in … having them all together and more closely tied in with styling and engineering will be a big asset to the company,” Jesmore said, adding, “I’ve sat through a lot of boring meetings there, so I’m kind of happy to see it go.”
But Jesmore said talking to his grandson about the design of the new world headquarters, which will be more open-concept for collaboration rather than individual offices, was an education.
“I feel a little antiquated because I’m used to a certain type of office building where people were segregated in offices, separate from each other,” Jesmore said. “This is a whole new world of open spaces and different environment for young people who demand different things than at my age. So it’s very much a revelation to me.”
The family tree
Bonner owes a lot to Ford’s Rouge Assembly plant in Dearborn.
For one thing, both of the fathers of his grandfather and his grandmother worked at the factory at the same time, long before their children would meet and become Bonner’s grandparents.
Here is the Bonner family tree as it related to Ford:
- Father: Russell Bonner worked for Ford from 1985 to 2013 as an engineer, mostly at the Product Development Center and then at Ford’s Allen Park Test Labs.
- Maternal grandfather: Don Jesmore worked at Ford from 1952 to 1991 as an engineer all over Australia and in Dearborn.
- Paternal grandfather: Robert Bonner worked 42 years for Ford from 1937 to 1979, taking a hiatus to serve in World War II. He was an electrician at Rouge Assembly plant.
- Paternal grandmother: Jean (Altounian) Bonner worked for Ford from 1946 to 1948 as a secretary at Rouge Assembly plant.
- Paternal great-grandfather: George Bonner worked for Ford from the 1930s to 1950s as a machinist at Rouge Assembly plant.
- Paternal great-grandfather: Malcan Altounian worked for Ford from the 1930s to 1950s in the toolroom at Rouge Assembly plant.
How Grandma caught her man
Bonner’s grandparents’ meeting is the stuff of a Hallmark romance movie with his plucky grandmother making sure she got her man in the end.
“My grandma was a secretary and my grandpa was an electrician and my grandma noticed him and she took a keen interest in him,” Bonner said. “She actually went into his HR file to get more information on him, which nowadays is so unbelievably frowned upon. But back then, that was how my grandma did it.”
Grandma got a lot of information on the handsome young Robert Bonner from his HR file.
“Apparently he wasn’t too freaked out by that, as he probably should have been,” Bonner said. “And the rest was kind of history there. She approached him and she definitely pursued him. They were married and had two kids: my dad and my aunt.”
Bonner’s grandmother died about 25 years ago and his grandfather died 10 years after she did.
Drive-bys and burgers
Bonner has odds and ends to finish on the site before the new HQ is completed in 2027. Ford will open it to the media for a tour next month, but the public has yet to have a look.
Bonner said he regularly drives Jesmore and his dad by the site to show them progress and then takes them to lunch at nearby Miller’s bar for burgers. Jesmore jokes that Ford took his company pass away years ago so he can’t get inside the new building for a sneak peek.
But as soon as Ford will allow the public inside, Jesmore plans to be there.
“I’m really excited to see the transformation,” Jesmore said. “We’ve seen what The Glass House is and how it operates. Now all the efficiencies that are gained by this new facility, combining everything into one place, it’s kind of a one-stop-shop where I think it’s going to lead to a lot better collaboration; I think it’s going to lead to a lot more efficiency.”
Jesmore no longer drives, but if he did, he said he would own a Lincoln Nautilus and added, “I’m excited to see the kind of products that roll out as Ford’s bringing itself forward.”
Back to that sunny October afternoon, Bonner, who arrives at work around 7:30 a.m. each day, collects his notebook from his office, opens the trailer door and begins the long trek back to the construction site for the third time that day. It’s close to 5 p.m.
He had to make one final check on the construction work, which will go on until 9 p.m. or later, before calling it a day and heading home where he knows, even there, “Ford is a backdrop for everything we do.”
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
