Heeding Distant Trumpets

Those who recall the 1950s, or who know anything of that uneasy decade beyond its doo-wop music, are no doubt aware of the Anti-Fluoride Marchers.

They were generally perceived to be a group of slightly skewed right-wingers or religious zealots who, for reasons of their own, were opposed to the dental health and dazzling smiles of our little children.

They picketed, pamphleteered and generally caused havoc at civic meetings called to discuss whether or not fluoride ought to be added to our water and toothpaste.

The Anti-Fluoride Army was convinced the stuff was dangerous and should be banned, not unlike those fighting malathion today.

It was an era during which All the People We Trusted were telling us that fluoride was not only harmless, but good for us, the way apple pie and T-bone steak are good for us.

One of those who thought they were all damned liars and wasn’t afraid to say so was a bright, noisy woman named Lorraine Escobar.

She and others of her persuasion were especially active in Los Angeles, to the extent that in 1966 they persuaded the City Council to vote against fluoridation.

We all thought the nuts had finally won, but now we’re not so sure. Maybe they weren’t nuts after all.

“Everyone thought we were John Birchers or Ku Klux Klanners or some damned thing,” Escobar said the other day as she led me to a corner of her dining room through a maze formed by stacks of files six feet high.

Her red barn of a house sits on a hilltop in the Silver Lake district. She’s lived there for 31 years.

The files are in varying degrees of order in and on top of cabinets, shelves, boxes, bags, drawers and baskets. All deal with fluoride.

They form a kind of alcove in which Escobar, a sturdy 67, keeps a desk, a red typewriter, a bouquet of artificial flowers and a telephone.

“I’m an old lady in tennis shoes,” she said, pointing to the sneakers on her feet. They completed an outfit that also included a print blouse and the kind of pleated black skirt schoolgirls wore in 1956.

Her gray-brown hair was pulled back in a pony tail. Thick-lensed glasses gave her a slightly myopic expression.

She sat behind a desk in the alcove and motioned me to a small, wooden chair meant for a 2-year-old. Then she began savoring a triumph she had waited 30 years for.

A week earlier, researchers for the National Toxicological Program reported that fluoride caused cancer in rats.

They were quick to add that it was only a preliminary study and the rats were given a lot more fluoride than humans get in toothpaste and water, but still . . .

Escobar was delighted. The nation was learning who the real nuts were.

“Fluoride is the most negative element on earth,” she began, in a style of confrontation honed over three decades.

“It’s an accumulative protoplasmic poison, like arsenic. It causes cancer and mongolism, wrecks your DNA and does more damned harm than anything imaginable.

“This is the worst scandal in human history. Government has been deliberately poisoning this nation since 1945. Who do they think they are?”

A cum laude graduate of USC, Escobar was a fighter long before the feminist movement made it generally acceptable for women to raise hell anywhere outside of the kitchen.

Her anti-fluoride radicalization came about listening to a radio show and then studying on her own. Once she was hooked, she says, she was hooked forever.

Escobar remains, all these years later, as breathlessly outspoken and opinionated as ever, and probably knows more about fluoride than anyone would ever want to hear.

Her head is jammed with data she fires in explosive bursts of knowledge that blast by your ear like volleys of artillery shells. They all say fluoride is poisonous.

“Everyone dies,” she said, “whether we’re a dog or an apple tree. In small amounts in nature, fluoride helps us die when we should.” Her voice rose. “But we’re getting it in megadoses and that’s killing us off faster than it ought to.”

I listened for an hour, not so much to learn about fluoride or even to allow Escobar to glory in the vindication of her cause. There’s another reason. Faint echoes of distant trumpets apply here.

If final studies do conclude that fluoride is as dangerous as Escobar always knew it was, shouldn’t we be listening a little harder to those who are saying the same thing about malathion?