Oxford — Oxford - Forty years ago, a young Tim Kearns tossed a baseball into his glove impatiently as his inventor-father tinkered with this bizarre contraption, an automobile windshield-wiper arm attached to the inside of a fish tank. Not surprisingly, Tim was growing irritated with his father's insistence that he pay attention rather than play ball.
Turns out Dad was on to something. Friday night, Tim Kearns, at 51 an architect and two-term commissioner of this Eastern Shore town, will be in the audience at Easton's Avalon Theatre as a major Hollywood movie based on his dad's life kicks off the inaugural Chesapeake Film Festival. He and his five siblings are also major characters in the film - although the baseball has been turned into a more photogenic basketball.
Tim Kearns, celebrity, watching Greg Kinnear play his father up there on the big screen in Universal Pictures' Flash of Genius. Who would have thought it?
Well, all the Kearns did, it turns out. "We had always laughed about it, since we were little kids, that my dad's life would make a great movie," says Tim Kearns, fully enjoying the minor glow this brush with the Hollywood spotlight is affording him.
Not that Tim, or any of his three brothers and two sisters, fully appreciated what was going on at the time. As an amateur inventor with a strong sense of family, Bob Kearns was determined to involve all his children with what he always thought of as the family business.
One invention in particular, he was convinced, would bring the Kearns family both fortune and fame.
That invention, which would eventually become the intermittent wiper that keeps our car windshields clear and streak-free during even the lightest of rains, never exactly became the family business. But it did become the family obsession, as Bob Kearns, who died in February 2005, spent more than two decades in court, arguing that big car companies like Ford and Chrysler had stolen his invention and claimed it as their own.
Determined to get the credit he felt was his due, scoffing at big-money settlement offers that failed to acknowledge the wrong he felt had been done him, Kearns waged the sort of protracted one-man war against overwhelming odds that Hollywood screenwriters love. He served as his own attorney, dragged car parts into court, spent years sorting through boxes upon boxes of paperwork, pored through volumes of legal proceedings. He was ruthless in pursuit of what he believed was justice, and wasn't interested in compromise.
