Buchanan’s Pick Had Checkered Career

Ezola Foster, Pat Buchanan’s running mate on the Reform Party ticket, collected workers’ compensation payments for nearly a year for a mental disorder she now says she did not have.

The disability claim, which was contested by her employer, the Los Angeles Unified School District, capped a checkered career in which Foster struggled financially as a result of bad business deals and twice resigned as a teacher after becoming embroiled in controversy, according to court records and interviews.

Foster applied for workers’ compensation in 1996, shortly after refusing to return to her job as a typing teacher at Bell High School.

“I have two choices to survive,” Foster said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Since it wasn’t physical, they make it mental, don’t they? If I don’t have a broken leg or they don’t see blood, or I’m not dead, they said I have to be crazy. And I would have been to go back there.”

The real reason she could not return to work, she said, was that her outspoken opposition to illegal immigration had made her a target of what she claimed was hatemongering and physical threats at an overwhelmingly Latino school.

The diagnosis of a mental disorder--which she declined to specify--was worked out “between my doctor and my attorney. . . . It’s whatever the doctor said that, after working with my attorney, was best to help me,” she said.

But although she claimed a mental disorder to receive the benefits, she strongly asserted that she has no mental problems and never did.

“I am perfectly sane,” Foster said.

Queried further about the matter, Foster asked whether a story was being done about her. She then told a reporter that it was his decision “if you want to put down there I pretended to be crazy when I’m not.” Shortly afterward, she hung up.

In a statement, Bay Buchanan, the candidate’s sister and executive co-chairwoman of the campaign, said: “Ezola Foster is an outstanding individual. Pat could not be more proud of his choice for vice president. As for her personal life from many years ago, we have no comment or concern.”

Buchanan, a conservative commentator and former speech writer for Richard Nixon, is battling a rival Reform Party faction for $12.6 million in federal campaign financing that goes to the party’s nominee. The party was founded in 1992 by billionaire industrialist Ross Perot.

When Buchanan picked Foster, his aides hailed her as a proponent of family values. Commentators saw the choice of Foster, an outspoken black conservative, as a smart political stroke that gave Buchanan an ideological soul mate and a buffer against charges that his rhetoric is racially inflammatory.

Records obtained from the state Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board show that Foster applied for benefits based on a mental condition. The precise claim, however, was blacked out of the public records, and attorneys for Foster have opposed a request by The Times to obtain the complete file. The appeals board has scheduled a hearing for Monday. She collected benefits until becoming eligible for retirement at age 60.

The disability claim was the final act in a long-running saga of Foster’s difficulties with the Los Angeles school district. District records show that in 1984 she resigned her teaching job at Jordan High School in South-Central Los Angeles. Her record there included one incident in which she filed a complaint with the teachers union charging a colleague with spreading rumors about her.

“It was so bizarre,” said Don Baer, a retired teachers union official who investigated the complaint, which he found merited no action. “I tried to drop it out of my memory bank.”

As Foster tells it, she fell out of favor because she stuck up for students who were being failed based solely on absences, a practice she contends violates state law.

After fighting off a forced transfer, Foster said, she faced so much hostility that she had to demand a transfer. It was denied.

“The only way I could get a transfer was to leave the district,” she said.

She returned to teaching in less than a year when she got the job at Bell.

After about a decade at that school, she filed suit against the district. According to the suit, two teachers inflamed the school against her after she appeared on the nationally televised “McNeil/Lehrer News Hour” in 1996 to argue for legislation that would have allowed states to prohibit schools from enrolling illegal immigrants.

On the show, Foster said she believed that illegal immigration was the primary cause of overcrowding in the Los Angeles school system.

“They called me a racist, a liar,” Foster said. “They called me a Nazi.”

Foster also charged that students under the supervision of a teacher threatened her with death and threw frozen soda cans in her direction when she spoke at an anti-immigration rally sponsored by Voice of Citizens Together. The group contends that Mexican political leaders and agitators in the U.S. are conspiring to reclaim Mexican sovereignty over the Southwest.

Despite her entreaties, Foster said, school officials took no action to investigate the threats or protect her.

Her suit sought damages for “serious physical ailments, emotional distress, fear, anxiety, depression and loss of self-esteem.” A Superior Court judge dismissed the suit without a trial.

Court records and other documents show that other aspects of Foster’s life have been complicated.

For example, court records show that Foster filed for divorce from her husband, Charles, in 1983, shortly after he had completed the adoption of her son by a previous marriage. The petition indicated the couple were separated for about a year and cited irreconcilable differences.

But in the interview, Foster laughed off the notion that she had wanted to divorce.

“We’ve never had that kind of problem,” she said.

“I have had some bad advice given to me legally in the past,” she said. “Maybe that was part of it.”

Real estate records trace two transactions in which the Fosters fared badly.

In 1986, the Fosters ran into trouble with a small house in South-Central they owned as an investment. The couple eventually sold out, receiving only the value of their debts.

A second real estate investment turned out worse. The Fosters bought a Long Beach duplex in 1993, intending to live in one unit and rent the other. Three years later, they defaulted on their mortgage.

“We didn’t realize that it was in a gang-infested area,” Foster said. “When we were taken there, you couldn’t tell. We went in the day, not at night when all the activity and the shooting went on.”

Foster said the gangs targeted her because of her prominence in the media. “With my speaking out against gang activity it was very unsafe for us,” she said. “We had to get out of there quickly.”

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Profile:

Ezola Foster

* Age: 62; born Aug. 9, 1938, in Texas.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in business education, Texas Southern University, 1960; master’s degree in school management and administration, Pepperdine University, 1973.

* Career highlights: Founder and president of Black-Americans for Family Values, 1987 to present; teacher in Los Angeles school system, 1963-1996; ran unsuccessfully for California Assembly, 1984 and 1986.

* Religion: Member of a Congregationalist church.

* Family: Married to Chuck Foster; three children.

* Quote: “We all know the American nation is the most compassionate on Earth, but we have opened up our homes to immigrants and we have welcomed more immigrants than all other countries combined. How much more compassionate can we be? We want to be compassionate, but we want to cease being stupid.”