Gerald D. Edwards

Age: 49 Residence: Ann Arbor
Occupation: President/CEO of Engineered Plastic Products
Why honored: For creating jobs and job skills around Metro Detroit
and around the world.

Working in a steel mill forged his determination to aid others

“I just saw the need and tried to do my part. Success is a wonderful thing, but it comes with the responsibility to help others who seek financial stability.” -- Gerald D. Edwards

orking in a steel mill in the sickening heat of a blast furnace motivated Gerald D. Edwards to make a highly successful venture into the corporate world. But it was a close encounter with poverty that made him a philanthropist.

    After buying a struggling automotive plastic components plant, using a buyout from Ford Motor Co. and a bank loan, Edwards reorganized the operation and watched revenues grow from $9 million in 1987 to nearly $35 million last year.

    Another calling soon followed upon that vocation.

    “I took my kids on an African safari four years ago and made a side trip to Johannesburg, and I remember being overwhelmed during a bus tour of Soweto,” recalls Edwards, president and chief executive of Engineered Plastic Products in Ypsilanti.

    “There were 2 million people there living in cardboard boxes and corrugated steel shanties. I got back on the bus because I couldn’t stand there and take pictures.

    “I knew that God didn’t have me go there just to see it and tell people about it. There was something I had to do, so my wife (Jada) and I contributed $200,000 to build a church and training center in Namibia.”

    During a recent trip to Namibia, which for decades suffered from apartheid along with neighboring South Africa, the Edwardses cut the ribbon on the new center. The facility teaches carpentry in a depressed area of nearly 40,000.

    “I just saw the need and tried to do my part,” Edwards says. “Success is a wonderful thing, but it comes with the responsibility to help others who seek financial stability.”

    Edwards, who has provided 25 college scholarships to area youths, says the gifts were in honor of a mentor who he admits had a tough time motivating him.

    Following a dismal freshman year marked by failing grades at Heidelberg College in Ohio, Edwards says, a matriarch from his hometown of Cleveland, Patricia Partridge, cleared the way for him to re-enroll and graduate.

    Now he’s returning the favor for people like Madeline L. Davis, a senior at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

    “Mr. Edwards has been a big mentor of mine since I was 5 years old, and he calls every so often to see how I’m doing,” says Davis, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English and plans to teach in Ann Arbor. “It would have been very stressful without this opportunity, and I’d be up to here with school loans plus work.”

    Edwards, whose firm produces interior trim components for DaimlerChrysler AG and General Motors Corp., tries to keep his success in perspective by reflecting on a drawing that hangs in his office, depicting his family’s modest Cleveland brownstone.

    “Mr. Edwards does a lot of things that I think are unusual for a chief executive,” says Theresa Dubay, human resource manager for Engineered Plastics. “He will come into the lunch room, grab something to eat and sit down with anyone.

    “We have a great summer picnic and Christmas party every year. He really rewards hard work and has made countless donations to area charities. He’s an extremely fair person, and if you have a problem, it becomes his problem, too.”

    — R.J. King