FOSTER FINDS `POLITICAL SOUL MATE'.

Byline: Beth Barrett Staff Writer

Ezola Foster makes a habit of grand exits.

A few years ago, Foster - Pat Buchanan's vice presidential running mate on the Reform Party ticket - ended her 33-year teaching career by kindling a near-riot with her comments on illegal immigrant students. Police had to escort her off campus and she never went back.

Her career as a Republican ended similarly except she was arrested, not escorted away, by police. Anaheim police dragged her to jail when she staged an anti-gay protest at the California Republican Convention. She won a settlement but wiped the GOP dust off her four-inch heels forever.

Today, Foster, 62, can flash her smile, newly brightened for the cameras, into the rearview mirror at the enemies she's collected over three decades of extremist political activity in L.A. that has led her in and out of court fights, the John Birch Society and various other political causes.

Foster harbors no doubt the national spotlight is where she belongs, alongside Buchanan, her ``political soul mate.''

``I've been on CNN, on talk shows, on Oprah, all over the place,'' Foster said in an interview last week, chatting on a friend's boat at Marina Del Rey, rather than in her Culver City apartment. ``Only local people don't know me.''

By that, Foster means she's never held a platform long enough to get out her message: American sovereignty hinges on a patriotism that ignores racial history, a morality that spurns homosexuality, a strict immigration policy and a theology rooted in Christianity.

Buchanan, a conservative television commentator, told crowds at the party's Aug. 11 fractious convention in Long Beach that he and Foster will promote the same vision as they compete against John Hagelin, the Natural Law Party and splinter Reform Party candidate, for $12.6 million in public campaign financing. With the money comes the mantle to the third party founded eight years ago by Texas billionaire Ross Perot.

Those who have tangled with her over the years say Foster moved to the right to fulfill political ambitions. They see her as a troublemaker who has sued the city and Los Angeles Unified School District for tens of millions of dollars, riled up impressionable students and sown divisiveness.

``I was beyond shocked at even the thought of Ezola Foster being on a national ticket for vice president of the United States,'' said Frank Ricchiazzi of Laguna Beach and a founder of the Log Cabin Republican Club, a gay and lesbian group. Ricchiazzi and Foster in the late 1980s were a familiar dueling duo on local talk shows.

``Once she starts talking, you have to wonder if all the marbles are there. She's the total, ultra extreme - totally paranoid on everything.''

Frank Visco, a former state GOP officer, said she is not - as Buchanan says - proof the Reform Party has broadened its base.

``Generally, she was very, very anti-inclusiveness in the political process. She was a person who had narrow views of both alternate religions and lifestyles,'' said Visco, a Lancaster resident active in party affairs.

Breaking away

Foster owes a debt for her political career to Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, an African-American with impeccable liberal credentials.

Waters so maddened Foster, then a business education teacher at David Starr Jordan High School in South Central, with a school sex education proposal that Foster decided to run against her for state Assembly in 1986.

Foster wanted students to be taught responsibility for their bodies, their education and their futures. Waters, who did not return calls, represented the antithesis, she said.

``I got hooked on the freedoms of the '60s. It was a mistake,'' said Foster, who said her first marriage was annulled when she learned her husband had a felony conviction. ``But at least I made it through college a virgin.''

She lost the legislative race, and the support of established African- American politicians.

Foster attacked the African-American pride movement, saying the very term made black children think they owed allegiance to an obscure African country, rather than to America.

She fought the teaching of ebonics, a phonetic system recognizing certain African-American speech patterns. She was infuriated by the one-fist ``black power'' salute. She wanted to meet the Rev. Jesse Jackson for only one reason, to tell him: ``Let my people go!''

When she was called Uncle Tom, she pointed out the error in gender. She took to wearing black and white as a symbol of racial harmony, then defended white LAPD officers who beat Rodney King in 1991. When the city canceled a fund-raising dinner for them, she sued for $155 million.

Ted Knoll, a gay Republican, initially thought he detected in Foster the very conservative strain he was looking for, ``a voice of compassionate conservatism in the wilderness.'' That impression was bolstered when she attended a Log Cabin meeting at Knoll's Silver Lake home.

``She sought our support, she got it and she took it,'' Knoll said.

Foster now says she didn't know what the Log Cabin was.

``Homosexuality is sinful, and it's shameful.''

Still, Foster had a long friendship with a gay drama coach on condition he wouldn't date students.

She pushed her point of view in 1987 as a delegate to the state GOP convention in Anaheim, introducing a resolution to disenfranchise the Log Cabin Club.

Foster said she was returning to the conference hall when security guards surrounded her, followed by Anaheim police, who took her to jail.

The criminal trespassing charges were dropped, and there was a confidential settlement.

``It didn't make up for what happened to me, but it was acceptable.''

School brawls

Foster, a typing and shorthand teacher, made her reputation at LAUSD as a whistleblower, a promoter of student causes, and a thorn in administrators' sides. Mostly, she said, they ignored her.

``I remember her, oh yeah,'' said former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Sidney Thompson, who supervised Foster in the late 1970s.

``When Ezola took a position, it was strong. From my position, I didn't see any leeway for us to adjust to.''

As a new teacher at Jordan High in the early 1960s, Foster said she was outraged at how federal funds for minority children were being spent. She went to the U.S. Department of Education, and some of her claims were vindicated.

Foster's work record shows she moved to three high schools, as well as substituted. She said the district engaged in a vendetta against her.

In July 1996, Foster, while teaching at Bell High School, appeared on a national talk show with school board member David Tokofsky and talked in strong terms about how the schools were overcrowded with children illegally in the country.

Two days later, she said fliers showed up in teachers' mailboxes accusing her of being a liar, racist and worse, she said. Students cried, teachers took sides and fights broke out. For her own protection, she was locked inside a classroom and neither the district nor union came to her defense.

``Finally, I was escorted out by school police. There was no way I would go back.''

Tokofsky, who followed Foster's activities after their TV meeting, said: ``It's amazing Buchanan didn't look underneath the hood, and that he took the skin-deep assessment of her conservatism.''

Picking cotton

The youngest of five children raised by a single mom in Houston, Texas, Foster spent summers at her grandparents' farm near the village of Maurice, La., where she helped with the cotton crop.

She attended mostly African-American schools but said she never felt the sting of racism.

Today, she and Buchanan infuriate many by saying states should be able to fly the Confederate flag over their capitols, a symbol many say trivializes the horrors of Southern slavery.

At Texas Southern University in the '60s, Foster said she joined one sit-in at a Houston drugstore but was pulled away at the last minute by friends who said her mother lacked the means to bail her out of jail.

``At the time, I felt like most of the others, that I was doing something good for our race,'' she said.

The `marriage' proposal

Foster had been making the talk show circuits for a while when Buchanan invited her to speak at a Washington, D.C., event which led to her being named his national co-chairwoman.

Days before the announcement she would be Buchanan's running mate, his sister, Angela M. ``Bay'' Buchanan, who had run for state treasurer in California in 1990, got Foster to sever her ties with the John Birch Society, her organization Americans for Family Values, and a Chatsworth-based bookstore, Trim Tax.

She said she had only ``proud and happy'' memories of the John Birch Society, a hard-core anti-Communist group.

On the evening of Aug. 9 - her birthday - Foster; her husband, Chuck; and the Buchanans went to dinner.

``Pat turned to me, almost like a marriage proposal,'' Foster said. ``He said, `Would you be willing to be my running mate for the Reform Party?' I said yes.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) FOSTER

(2 -- color) Ezola Foster acknowledges the crowd as Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan introduces her as his running mate.

Victoria Arocho/Associated Press