When he was a little boy growing up in Iran, Aarash Darroodi recalls dashing for cover when sirens warned that missiles were coming from Iraq.
“I remember buildings being blown up around us,” he says. “When the Scud missiles hit the ground, the vibration that you felt in your chest, even when it was miles away, was unbelievable; something I will never forget.”
Those attacks are part of Darroodi’s turbulent, decades-long journey during which he was separated from his parents, survived war, traveled throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia, and eventually landed a dream job as the top lawyer at one of America’s most iconic music companies.
“Overseas, we consumed American music at a rate you cannot even imagine. It was our only access to American culture,” says Darroodi, 41, executive vice president and general counsel of Fender Musical Instruments Corp. “It’s quite fascinating and ironic that as a child I loved Elvis and Buddy Holly and Jimi Hendrix, and one day I actually would be working for the same company that supplied these angels with the instruments to create.”
Safe home to war zone
Darroodi was born in Houston, where his Iranian parents, Ali and Marjan, were studying chemical engineering. It had been their intention to return to their homeland to work in the oil industry, but their plans unraveled when skirmishes between Iraq and Iran began in 1980.
Because the battles were remote and infrequent, his maternal grandparents recommended sending the 6-month-old boy, who had a U.S. passport, to Iran so they could care for him while his parents applied for work authorization in the U.S. and established a home.
“My parents stayed because had they gone to Iran, they would have never been able to leave,” Darroodi explains, adding that his father also would have been drafted into military service.
A few years after he arrived in Iran, the war escalated and missile attacks intensified on Tehran, where Darroodi and his grandparents, Hamid Arbab, a doctor, and his wife, Lila, would stay while trying to secure visas to get out of the country. They spent most of their time in the city of Mashhad, considered safer because it was a holy site less likely to be bombed. There, Darroodi enrolled in school and tried to live as normal a life as possible. As he got older, the boy realized his grandparents were not his actual parents and asked where they were. “And they would say, ‘the United States,’” he says.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow. Hollywood movies come from the United States, rock ‘n’ roll comes from the United States, and my parents are in the United States,’” he says. “‘I’ve got to find a way to get to the United States.’”
Because they were banned from traveling to the U.S. from Iran, Darroodi and his grandparents went to 19 countries on tourist visas to seek help at U.S. embassies, the last being Turkey, which granted them visas in 1988.
His grandmother sold everything the family owned, and all three traveled to the U.S. By then, Darroodi’s parents had withdrawn from college and moved to Monrovia, Maryland, where they earned degrees in accounting and got jobs with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. They later started their own accounting firm. Darroodi recalls being the only Middle Easterners in the community and seeing few people of color. “I faced discrimination on a daily basis,” he says. “I was spit on. I was told to go back to my country.”
When he applied to a prestigious private school in fifth grade, the headmaster called his mother in for what they thought was an interview. “The gist of what he said was, ‘Your son is very smart, but his accent is too thick, and he really won’t be able to fit in with the other kids,’” Darroodi recalls. “We got in the car, and my mom started uncontrollably crying. But I didn’t cry. I waited until I got home. I didn’t want to make her sad to see me sad.”