Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  But when Fredi turned eight, his parents announced that they were returning to Tehran. Suddenly, Fredi found himself at an international school in Iran. Half the day they spoke English, but the other half, they spoke Farsi. He didn’t speak the language and was lost for much of it. Math was particularly challenging since Iranians use a different notation to express numbers. His fellow students made fun of him because, as an eight-year-old, he couldn’t even solve 1 + 1. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the math; he just couldn’t do the math in their language. For the first month, he came home crying every day.

  For Fredi, Iran felt like a place he should know but didn’t. He was fascinated by the bazaars, which felt wildly exotic, with the strange, pungent smells of carpet and leather shops. The family’s duplex in Tehran—with the marble on the walls and a marble exterior façade—seemed equally foreign. He never fully adjusted, and after just a year in Iran, the family decided to return to Phoenix.

  For Fredi, Phoenix was home. By the time he was ten years old, the Lajvardis had moved into a forty-six-hundred-square-foot modernist home designed by Paul Yeager, a Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte. Tour buses would ferry architecture buffs past the house while Fredi and his brother waved from the balcony. He felt that the family belonged in Arizona and was respected. After all, both his parents were doctors, and the expectation was that he would go into medicine as well. His future seemed set.

  Then revolution erupted in Iran. The American embassy was overrun, and sixty-six Americans were taken hostage. Fredi had just started high school at Camelback High. Kids who had never paid attention to him now identified him as Iranian and began to heckle him. At some restaurants in Phoenix, owners posted signs that read NO IRANIANS. Across the country, Iranians were targeted and attacked.

  As the hostage crisis stretched out, the antagonism grew. One day, after cross-country practice during his sophomore year, Fredi headed home on his bike. As he pulled out of the school parking lot, a truck full of teenagers roared up and started yelling, “Damn Iranian!” The driver veered toward Fredi, forcing him into the curb. He flew off the bike and landed on the pavement as the teens poured out of the car and surrounded him. They kicked him until members of the cross-country team started running their way. Fredi’s attackers raced off, leaving him in a ball on the ground.

  When he got home, he told his parents that he’d fallen off his bike. He was afraid that they’d pull him off the cross-country team if they knew the truth. Part of his coping mechanism was to focus on his running, and he didn’t want to lose it. He turned his frustration into speed and went to the state championship every year in the 5K.

  His other outlet was building things. In eighth grade, he constructed a hovercraft out of notebook paper and balsa wood. Powered by an electric motor, it could float across a tabletop. He demonstrated it at a regional science fair and caught the attention of Ann Justus, a science teacher at Camelback, who had grown up in Texas.

  “Good work,” she said in a Texan drawl. “I’m signing you up for my seminar.”

  It was as if he’d been let into a secret club. It was so secret, he didn’t even know what she was talking about. But when he arrived at high school, he saw that he was enrolled in a class called Science Seminar, taught by Justus. He found the classroom and discovered Justus’s freewheeling class devoted to building things.

  With Justus’s encouragement, Fredi’s hovercraft quickly became his obsession. Every year, he improved on his initial design, building larger and more ambitious vehicles. Unlike other students, who entered new projects into the yearly science fair, Fredi continued entering his hovercraft, and every year he won first place at the Central Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair. What began as something the size of a toaster grew into a six-hundred-pound, sit-on-top, gasoline-powered hovercraft by 1983, his senior year. It ran off of a repurposed sixty-horsepower snowmobile engine and could reach speeds of twenty-five miles per hour.

  The local news heard of the mechanical wunderkind at Camelback and dispatched Jerry Foster, a pioneering helicopter news reporter, to cover the story. Foster landed his Bell 206 JetRanger copter on the Camelback football field, making Fredi an instant celebrity on campus. Even though his hovercraft looked like a partially deflated orange life raft with a large white fan mounted at the front, it worked. Fredi had painted the words DOS EQUIS on the side, and he rode on the back wearing oversize, clear plastic laboratory glasses. “I probably could have had three girlfriends that day if I was focused on that,” he says. In reality, he looked like a supergeek and had no girlfriend.

  His parents didn’t think much of his “toy.” To them, it was just a distraction from schoolwork. Building useless conveyances wasn’t going to get him ahead in life, they argued. Getting a medical degree would.

  When he started college at Arizona State University, he began the premed track but found himself drawn back to Justus’s Science Seminar at Camelback High. He would drop in to visit his former teacher after class and help younger students develop their projects. It was much more interesting than the dry lectures he attended and the seemingly pointless memorization required.

  At Camelback, Justus watched him working with the students and was impressed. When it came to helping kids build things, he was brimming with enthusiasm and had a natural ability to get the kids excited too. If a kid wanted to figure out if the size of a fish tank affected fish growth, Fredi was ready to help track down a bunch of fish tanks. Interested in holograms? Fredi had suggestions about laser wavelengths. A solar-powered barbecue? Fredi thought it was a great idea.

  During his freshman year at ASU, Justus took him aside on one of his visits to her classroom. “You know you’re just wasting your time with this premed stuff,” she told him. “You’re meant to be a teacher.”

  Fredi laughed. It seemed like a ridiculous suggestion. He was going into sports medicine. He’d combine his interest in running with what his parents expected of him. It’d be great.

  But by his sophomore year, he just couldn’t focus anymore on the college science classes. They felt entirely detached from the real world. He decided that architecture might be more hands-on so he dropped out of the premed track. To get into the undergraduate architecture program, students had to complete an array of prerequisite courses and then apply. For the next two years, Fredi worked through the course work and then sent in his application. He wasn’t a straight-A student but figured his enthusiasm would tip the balance. After all, architecture seemed like the perfect fit for him: it was a mix of construction and science.

  He was blindsided when his application was rejected. The school of architecture wasn’t interested in him. The rejection was doubly painful because Ali, his younger brother, was an academic ace who had just graduated from Camelback tied for valedictorian. Ali was bound for the premed track at the University of California at San Diego and would go on to get his medical degree at Johns Hopkins, eventually specializing in vascular and interventional radiology. He seemed to be fulfilling the family’s expectations.

  Fredi, on the other hand, was spending his free time hanging out at Justus’s workshop with teenagers who were building strange and often useless contraptions. His mother encouraged him to spend more time studying instead; that might help him do better and get back on some kind of respectable track. Fredi knew he had to do something; he just didn’t know what.

  Justus continued to remind Fredi that there was a simple, obvious answer: he should be a teacher. But Fredi had a slew of reasons why it didn’t make sense.

  “People don’t respect teachers,” he added.

  “Who cares what other people think?” she fired back. “You’re happy when you’re here, aren’t you?”

  Fredi didn’t want to concede the point. “No offense, but I’ve seen the cars teachers drive. They’re worse than the students’.”

  “Who cares what car you drive?”

  “Teachers make no money,” he said, almost begging her to admit that it wasn’t a good career choice
.

  “Money’s not everything.”

  Fredi ran out of arguments.

  Justus just stared at him until he squirmed under her glare. “You’re making a difference in people’s lives.”

  “I don’t want to be a teacher,” he said.

  “Quit messing around,” she ordered. “You’re already a teacher.”

  Fredi returned to ASU and started taking education courses. He discovered that most of his course work would count toward a degree in secondary education with a science focus. Compared to the other class work he had done, the education courses felt natural and easy. He was assigned to student-teach at Camelback, and when he showed up for his first staff meeting, Justus made an announcement: “He finally listened to me.”

  Everybody clapped.

  The reaction at home was less supportive. Fredi’s first full-time teaching job was at Carl Hayden, where he replicated Justus’s Science Seminar. His energy caught the attention of the Phoenix Jaycees, a charitable organization of businessmen, who named Fredi the city’s Most Innovative Teacher in 1988. When he took the trophy home to show his mother, she didn’t show much interest.

  “When are you going to go get a real degree?” she asked.

  Fredi couldn’t believe it. Growing up, his mother had always told him to be the best at whatever he did. Now he’d proven that he was a great teacher, but it wasn’t good enough.

  “You’re breaking your father’s heart being a teacher,” his mother said.

  Fredi felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He turned and walked out.

  In 1996, Fredi married Pam Nuñez, the school psychologist at Carl Hayden. Far from giving up on teaching, he was putting down roots. He coached cross-country and started an electric-car racing program. His students built vehicles that could rocket up to a hundred miles per hour. Still, the tension with his parents remained.

  In 1997, Pam and Fredi had their first child, a boy they named Bijan. Alex, another boy, was born in 1999. They bought a nice house in Gilbert, a town in East Phoenix, and Pam took time off to raise the children. Toward the end of 2001, she was considering going back to work when it became clear that something was different about Alex. At age two, he began talking in full sentences, but then, over a period of three months, he stopped speaking.

  “It was like a light switch turned off,” Fredi says.

  Alex was diagnosed with pronounced autism. He moved in repetitive patterns, burst into angry frustration for unclear reasons, and couldn’t engage in normal social interactions. It was as if he were living in a parallel universe. At the same time, Bijan, the older boy, was struggling with social settings. Loud noises bothered him; if a group of kids broke into laughter, Bijan cringed. Later, he would explain that the noise was “painful.” By 2002, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a less severe form of autism that made socializing difficult but also provided unique insights into the world.

  Soon after the diagnosis, Fredi’s parents moved out of state. The relationship had been strained for years, but now it worsened. Fredi was in the midst of the most challenging experiences of his life and ended up facing it without their support. His parents settled in Las Vegas, where Ali practiced medicine. They called infrequently and, eventually, stopped communicating altogether. Fredi felt as if he never measured up to their expectations.

  It hurt, but he had other things to focus on. He had two young kids, both of whom needed a great deal of attention. In 2002, when Cristian and Lorenzo were freshmen, Fredi scaled back his extracurricular activities. He apologized to the students he coached on the cross-country team and shut down his after-school electric-car program. He wasn’t going to have time for all that anymore.

  That’s when Cristian Arcega walked into his room wanting to build robots. Soon after that, Oscar Vazquez and Lorenzo Santillan arrived, desperate for new ways to define themselves.

  IN 1989, inventor Dean Kamen came to work early on a rainy Saturday morning in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was thirty-eight, hefted a briefcase, and wore a denim button-up and jeans—denim on denim was his daily uniform. He was pleased to see that the parking lot was full. He assumed it meant that his staff of engineers was hard at work on a weekend day. But when he got to his office building, he didn’t see engineers. He saw kids everywhere.

  In his twenties, Kamen had invented a self-regulating syringe that was safer and more reliable than a human-administered shot. When he turned thirty, he sold his company to a large health-care firm, netting himself a sizable fortune. He used some of the money to buy an old textile mill on the bank of the Merrimack River in Manchester and converted the top two floors into a private research-and-development laboratory. He kept the bottom floor clear and spent about three hundred thousand dollars constructing a science museum. He didn’t charge admission and built a lot of the exhibits himself. It was his way of giving back to the community, and he was pleasantly surprised that the space had attracted so many kids, particularly on a weekend. It seemed as though his new museum was turning into a hit.

  Rather than go immediately up to his office, Kamen wandered through the museum. Children were bouncing in his antigravity machine, blowing giant bubbles at the bubble display, and making their hair stand on end at the electrostatic machine. He strolled past the Bernoulli Blower and watched kids marvel at the way the ball just floated in place above the fan. There was a sense of chaos and excitement. The kids were clearly having fun.

  “I was feeling real good,” Kamen recalls. “I didn’t realize that I was about to have a transformative experience that would ruin my nights and weekends for the next twenty-three years.”

  Kamen stopped a kid wearing a Boston Celtics jersey and asked if there were other science experiments the kid would like to see. It was as if Willy Wonka had asked what kind of candy bar to make next, but the kid just shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think’s really cool in technology?” Kamen persisted.

  “I don’t know.”

  Kamen thought he’d try a different angle. “Do you know any famous scientists or inventors?” he asked, thinking an exhibit could be built around a personality. The kid shook his head.

  Kamen wanted to forget about it and get to work, but he decided to try again with another kid. He got the same response: the next boy didn’t know any inventors either. Kamen asked a dozen kids if they could name any living engineer, scientist, or inventor, and none of them came up with anything. Frustrated, he decided to ask the parents; they couldn’t think of any.

  “This isn’t mud wrestling,” Kamen thought to himself. “This is a science center, so these are already a self-selecting group of the crème de la crème.”

  Finally, one dad had a burst of inspiration: “Einstein! But I think he’s dead.”

  Kamen walked out frustrated and annoyed. “Who am I kidding?” he thought. He was subsidizing the wealthy kids one at a time, reaching a population that probably didn’t need the extra help anyway. And the idea didn’t scale. “In the grand scheme of things, this will probably have no measurable impact on the world,” he concluded.

  By the time he got up to his office on the second floor, he’d decided that kids didn’t need more access to knowledge. There were plenty of books, and the information age was about to erupt: there was already an overwhelming supply of knowledge. He realized that kids just weren’t that interested in science and technology, certainly in comparison to other things. Their heroes were mostly sports stars, and Kamen fumed that kids were pursuing sports careers that would never pan out. “They’re thinking that if they work hard bouncing a ball for the next ten years, they’ll be the next great basketball player,” he groused.

  Kamen had a bolt of inspiration: “I’ve got to create something that doesn’t compete with other science centers; it’s got to compete with the World Series and the Super Bowl. I’ve got to find a way to make science and technology cool.”

  He decided to start a robot contest. He wanted it to be a fini
te experience, like a sports season, with a series of events leading up to a championship. There had to be superstars, so he recruited mentors from Apple, IBM, and eventually Google. The goal was to show kids what engineers looked like: young men and women of all backgrounds who made good money, drove nice cars, and were as interesting as the people who bounced balls for a living.

  The initial contest was held in February 1992 at Memorial High School in Manchester. The twenty-eight teams were composed of high schoolers predominantly from the Northeast. Kamen paired teams up with engineers from big-league companies such as ATT, Boeing, Alcoa, GE, IBM, and Xerox. He wasn’t looking for financial support: he asked the professionals to donate their nights and weekends during the six weeks leading up to the event. Their job was to mentor teens and show them what it meant to think like an engineer.

  The event was a lot of fun. Kamen constructed a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot field and sprinkled it with tennis balls. Three teams faced off against three others, and whichever alliance collected the most balls moved on to the next round. He called the competition FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. The emphasis was on cooperation and ingenuity, and it proved to be a combustible mix. Every year, the FIRST competition grew, spreading across the country. By 2001, the 13 regional competitions had approximately 25,000 teens competing on 520 teams.

  Fredi saw a flyer about FIRST in 1999 and thought it sounded like a good way to get kids involved in something hands-on. But when he decided to start a small team at Carl Hayden in 2000, he quickly realized he couldn’t do it alone. The robots needed to be programmed, and Fredi had never studied computer science. He liked designing things and then building them with hammers and saws. The nuance of coding didn’t interest him. Plus, by 2001, his family life was forcing him to cut back on his extracurricular activities. He was going to need some help.