Bob Kearns with wife Phyllis in 1971

By Sydney Redigan Public Affairs Writer The film Flash of Genius, opening October 3rd, portrays the life of Bob Kearns, a former mechanical engineering professor at Wayne State who fought the Big Three for rights to the intermittent windshield wiper. Here his close friends talk about the real Bob Kearns. Bill Foley drops a binder, thick with every newspaper clipping ever written about Bob Kearns, onto the table. “This,” he says dramatically, “does not do him justice.” Foley, a retired mechanic, has gathered with his sister and brother-in-law, Joanne and Jim Donohoe, to share memories of Bob Kearns, the Wayne State mechanical engineering M.S. graduate and former engineering professor who has become well-known for taking on the Big Three in a fight over the patent rights to the intermittent windshield wiper. Kearns made headlines in the 70s, 80s and 90s when he sued Ford and Chrysler, and upon his death in February 2005 when newspapers hailed him as the patent system’s David who took on the auto industry’s Goliath. With the upcoming release of Flash of Genius, a film that chronicles Kearns’ fight, he is making news again. Flash of Genius begins in the late 60s when Kearns first sued Ford, but his relationship with the Donohoes and Foley began long before he went to court. Joanne Donohue attended Marygrove College in the early 1950’s and had a close group of girlfriends, one of them Kearns’ future wife, Phyllis McElwee. After graduation, many of the women married University of Detroit graduates, like Kearns, and formed a potluck group that still meets today. Foley and his wife, Pat, joined the group and soon became good friends with Kearns. As the three begin their stories, it becomes apparent that Foley is right - all the news clippings and even the plot summaries for the upcoming film do not do Kearns justice. His life, as told by those who knew him well, is too full and too colorful to be captured by an obituary or in one film. The lawsuits may have consumed the end of Kearns’ life, but, as Foley says, “Bob was a man who wore more hats than I did.” From his service in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) during World War II, to his role as Detroit’s Building and Safety Commissioner, to his time as a Wayne State professor, to his entrepreneurial turn as the owner of a pizza parlor, Kearns seems to have lived many lives, each full of rich and amusing stories. “I call him a leprechaun,” Foley begins his story. “He was this short of being a midget and he was so charming; you just couldn’t tell him ‘no’.” The Donohoes recall Kearns’ insistence that any visitors to his household come down to the basement, where he set up his lab, to see his latest invention. Much of this charm, Foley reasons, was due to Kearns’ story-telling tendencies. “I think he fabricated that bit about the cork,” Foley says, referring to the story Kearns told to explain the inspiration for the intermittent windshield wiper. On his wedding night in their hotel room, Kearns was struck in the left eye with a champagne cork, permanently damaging his vision. As Kearns told the story, years later he was driving through a light rain, unable to see clearly from both the incessant wipers and his impaired vision, when the idea occurred to him to design a windshield wiper that works like an eyelid, blinking occasionally. Regardless of whether or not the story is true, it seems that that misting day was not the only time Kearns’ had difficulty driving. Foley still sounds horrified recounting the time Kearns drove him into Northern Michigan for a hunting trip with only half his vision. As Detroit’s Building and Safety commissioner, Kearns was required to take a city car equipped with a radio – and was the only one allowed to drive it. “He had no depth perception,” Foley remembers. “I was cowering in the backseat the entire time, trying to find a way to tell Bob, YOU CAN’T DRIVE!” Kearns’ infamous bad driving was the subject of another of Foley’s stories, in which he spotted Kearns in a city car pulled over by police. Foley recalls, “I went home and called him and told him I was a reporter for the Free Press and understood he was in an altercation and was there much damage done to the city car? Bob starts stuttering and stammering. They had it covered up and no one was going to know he had this accident. Then I started laughing and hear, ‘Damn you, Foley.’” While many of Foley’s memories focus on the fun and raucous times he and Kearns had, Joanne Donohoe’s recollections focus more on Phyllis, and how Kearns’ obsession with his patent rights affected her close friend. “He was very brilliant,” Joanne Donohoe says. “But there’s a very thin line between genius and madness.” She explains how Kearns became so absorbed in the cases that divorce was inevitable. “He talked constantly about his patent.” Despite the divorce and a remarriage, Joanne Donohoe says that Phyllis always supported her ex-husband and will be buried with him at Mount Kelley cemetery in Dearborn. “Bob and Phyllis were both very smart,” Joanne Donohoe explains, “but it was very difficult to live with someone like that. He was obsessed.” Despite the $30 million Kearns won from settlements with Ford and Chrysler, the obsession over his patent never seemed to die. According to Jim Donohoe, it was never about money. All Kearns wanted was to manufacture the windshield wiper parts himself; his lawsuits were about justice. “He was going to fight the patent system for the treatment of the little guy,” says Jim Donohoe. Flash of Genius and many of the articles written about Kearns seem to portray him as a sort of crusader for the rights of the individual. As Kearns’ youngest daughter, Maureen Kearns, said in Kearns’ obituary in the Detroit Free Press, “There was more to [his] tale than the lone battler of giants.” Although the lawsuits may have overshadowed his life, they were not his entire life. According to Foley, “the best thing about Bob Kearns’ life was his funeral.” In fact, Foley wrote a short essay on this subject, describing the funeral procession that accidentally meandered from River Rouge to Tiger Stadium to Dearborn, where Kearns was finally interred. “Bob would have loved it,” Foley writes. “He didn’t want to ‘go quietly into that sweet night.’” And, as has been mentioned in almost every account of Kearns’ death, a light mist fell the entire time, so that every car in the procession was using the device that Kearns was supposed to have invented. “Did he invent it?” Foley asks for input from Jim and Joanne Donohoe. “Who knows? He was an honest man who had an idea.”   For another look at the life of Bob Kearns, click here