Fred - The growing up years

Well that sure woke me up. I went for my run during lunchtime and when I hit the showers there was no hot water. The cold shower wasn’t as bad as I was expecting however since it is 90° outside and I was dripping with sweat. Since there isn’t anything specific going on right now I thought I would talk a bit about what I do every day here at Kyocera. I heard it said once that most men love to talk about their careers. I don’t know if that is true for everyone but it is definitely true about me. It would be impossible for me to describe my career in one short blog so I think I will do it in a five part mini-series. Part I will be entitled, “Fred Leavitt – The Growing up Years”. As long as I can remember I have loved science, even before I knew it was called science. In elementary school my favorite class was science and then in High School when I learned I could take a physics class and a chemistry class and a biology class and auto mechanics and graphic arts I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The only thing that marred my life was English and Social Studies. I was about 13 years old when I rebuilt my first Briggs & Stratten motor. Dad had an old lawn mower engine that didn’t work so I cleared out a spot in Dad’s shop and took it apart cleaned it up and put it together again. It worked great. In ninth grade the principal of the school was Alma Sommerfeldt. He picked me and about 4 other guys out of math class and taught us separately. He figured we were some sort of prodigies and that small group setting gave me a huge head start in algebra. At about 15 years I rebuilt my first car motor, it was an old flat head straight six. A beautiful engine. My partner and I rebuilt our engine a month before anyone else did. My idol was my brother Greg. He was the closest thing to a scientist that I knew and I envied his lab. It was a happy day when Greg went on his mission and I inherited the lab. I really wanted to build a rocket like he did in the worst way. I was a bit handicapped however since I had no way of getting high strength steel pipe and powdered Zn. When it came time to go to college I took an aptitude test to see what careers I was inclined towards. My results were very strange. Mechanical Engineering scored 96%, Civil Engineering scored 93%, Forest Ranger scored about 95%, Electrical Engineering scored around 75% and then the next highest career was below 50%. I guess I didn’t have a well balanced character but it was pretty clear what I should do. I loved the outdoors and the mountains and I knew I would love being a forest ranger but if I did that I would never be able to do the sciences. If I was to be an engineer however I could still hike the mountains and enjoy nature. My brother in law Mark Hansen had recently started his career as a Civil Engineer so I headed off to BYU to become a Civil Engineer. The funny thing is that I didn’t apply for a single scholarship. I really didn’t think of myself as a particularly smart kid but years later when I looked back at my grades I had “honors” in five classes and good grades in the rest. I’m not sure what honors meant back then but I know it was a high A. I had honors in Physics (by far my favorite class), chemistry, biology (I remember I had a 100% in that class), Calculus, and Auto shop. I do know that my only “D” in grades 1 through 12 was in PE. My kids love to tease me about that one.