Her mother, Delores, worked the night shift at Stonebridge 5 days a week. She left the apartment at 9:00 and came home at 6:00 in the morning smelling like bleach and floor wax. There was no father. There was no second income. There was Delores, and there was whatever Delores could carry on her back.
That meant Ivory spent most of her childhood with Mr. Clarence Davis, an 80-year-old retired diesel mechanic who lived two doors down. Delores paid him with home-cooked meals; he paid her back by keeping Ivory alive and out of the streets.
Mr. Davis's garage was a museum of broken things waiting to be reborn: lawnmower engines on the workbench, a disassembled marine diesel in the corner, motorcycle parts hanging from nails on the wall, and in the center, on jack stands, an old Buick Skylark that hadn't run since 1987. Most babysitters would have sat Ivory in front of a television; Mr. Davis handed her a wrench.
"If you're going to be in my garage," he said, "you're going to be useful."
By age 10, she could identify every component in a single-cylinder engine by touch. By 11, she could strip one down and rebuild it in an afternoon. By 14, she was rebuilding transmissions for neighbors at $50 a job, cash in an envelope slid under her mother's pillow before Delores woke up.
At 16, a machine shop owner three blocks away hired her off the books to fix his CNC lathe. The previous repair tech had quoted him $4,000; Ivory fixed it in 2 days for 200. The owner asked where she went to school. She said, "I go to Englewood High, but I learned from Clarence."
She applied to the Illinois Institute of Technology her senior year, got accepted, partial scholarship—but partial wasn't full, and the gap was $18,000 a year. Delores made 29,000 before taxes. The math didn't work. It never works for people like Ivory.
So, she didn't go. She worked. She fixed things. She taught herself robotics by watching MIT OpenCourseWare lectures on a cracked tablet propped against a coffee can in her basement. She bought salvaged servo motors from scrapyards for $10 a piece and practiced until her fingers knew the circuits better than her brain did.
She was 19 when she met Dr. Elaine Prescott. It happened at a free public lecture at the Museum of Science and Industry. Dr. Prescott—retired NASA propulsion engineer, consultant to three defense contractors, the kind of woman whose name made other engineers sit up straight—was giving a talk on robotic systems in space exploration.
During the Q&A, a young woman in the back row raised her hand and asked a question about feedback loop instability in multi-axis robotic arms. The question was so specific, so technically precise, that Dr. Prescott paused mid-answer and looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time.