RANCHO SANTA FE — As peers marched for women’s rights and against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., in 1972, Susan Foster quietly accepted a position as a legislative aide in the office of Congressman William J. Keating, R-Ohio. She was 21.

“I was told that I would be the first female legislative aide to a Republican member of the House of Representatives,” she recalls with pride. “My first week will always be remembered as one that was exciting and memorable to this day.”

A highlight was the weekly legislative meeting in the offices of House Speaker Gerald R. Ford. That is, until Foster learned that despite passage of the Civil Rights Bill eight years earlier, Ford barred women from attending the meeting.

With support of male aides in Keating’s office, Foster decided to go anyway.

“The first thing I remember is how plush the carpet felt beneath my feet as we entered through heavy wooden doors that were wide open to accommodate the hundreds of aides filing in,” she said. “Then two well-dressed guards moved together in one synchronized side step, blocking the doorway. ‘No secretaries allowed,’ I was informed.” Foster explained that she was a legislative aide, not a secretary, and wanted to join her colleagues.

“The arms that were folded across their chests spoke volumes, but there was one quiet sentence uttered with a heavy emphasis on each word: ‘Don’t. Come. Back.’”

Foster said she turned, holding her head high and squaring her shoulders.

“I walked out and swore to myself that I would never again be kept from any place or any mission that I was entitled to be a part of,” she said.

It is that memory that today fuels Foster’s resolve to stand up to the wireless industry. She credits her strength to her late grandfather, Joe Foster Sr., a labor negotiations attorney for Walgreens in Chicago who once stood up to Jimmy Hoffa.

“‘You speak for those who have no voice,’” he told me. “That’s the highest calling in life and that’s what he expected of me.”

Foster first learned about the dangers of cell phone towers in 1999 when a neighbor approached her while she was walking her dog.

“She asked if it was true that I was a medical social worker,” Foster recalls. “Then she asked if I knew about a cell tower planned for the neighborhood.

“‘What’s a cell tower?’” I replied.

The woman explained that her husband worked for the wireless industry and would lose his job if his employer knew she was meddling in the installation of a new cell tower.

For six months, unmarked manila envelopes containing cell phone studies mysteriously found their way beneath Foster’s doormat.

The information prompted her to launch a campaign against placement of the cell towers.

“We won by educating the neighborhood and getting a permit to picket at the Morgan Run Golf Club during a celebrity tournament,” she said. “But we were prohibited from discussing health concerns at a public hearing because of Sec. 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which states that local authorities cannot reject a request for wireless facilities based on health concerns if the facilities met the FCC’s regulations concerning radiofrequency (RF) emissions.

“In short, federal law trumps local law.”

Capt. Marvin Currier at Fire Station 24 in Carmel Valley saw Foster on the television and contacted her regarding his concerns about 24 antennas that were scheduled to be installed on his fire station roof.

Foster said that fire stations were targeted for cell tower placement because cities collected thousands of dollars for leasing them to wireless companies, which would seek out the locations because they are almost always built near roads with high traffic volume, thus the signals serve commuters who are frequent cell phones users.

Currier explained he had no funds for an attorney, and asked Foster if she would consider writing an appeal.

“Again, because of Sec. 704 the Telecommunications Act, I had to write an appeal based on a safety issue and couldn’t touch the health issue,” she said.

“One of the wireless companies gave up, so only four antennas were placed on the station.”

She added that when she advised the other wireless company that she was going to conduct a health study of firefighters, they changed the configuration of the antennas to avoid directly impacting the firefighters.

Foster’s advocacy for Station 24 resulted in being inundated with e-mails from around the world from firefighters living and working beneath cell towers who complained of depression, confusion and disorientation.

In 2003, Foster began collecting lists of symptoms and stories from firefighters in Carpinteria, Calif., who had suffered since the installation of a very large cell tower beaming across their living and sleeping quarters five years earlier. Foster became so concerned she contacted Gunnar Heuser, M.D., PhD of Los Angeles, a world-renowned expert in the field of neurotoxicology. Heuser designed a study of objective neurological exams including SPECT scans of the Carpinteria firefighters’ brains.

“In addition to showing brain abnormalities on the SPECT scans, the firefighters were shown to have slowed reaction time and difficulty making decisions,” Foster explained. “This is the last thing you want from your first responders.”

In August, Foster traveled to Boston for the International Association of Firefighters convention. There she wrote and helped introduce Resolution 15, which called for a moratorium on the placement of cell towers on fire stations. The measure passed with support from a coalition of firefighters from the United States and Canada.

“We got the spirit of a moratorium on placing cell towers on fire stations across the U.S. and Canada, but we could not undo what was already done, and the cities continue to rent out their fire stations for revenue,” Foster said. “The ideal situation in this harsh economy is to place cell towers so they are not beaming directly across the living quarters of the firefighters who eat, sleep and work at the stations for up to 72 hours at a time.

As for the fire station in Carpinteria, Nextel removed the mega tower and put in two smaller towers — one beaming north and one beaming south to cover eight lanes of traffic, Foster said. “This way the firefighters were no longer subjected to the intense RF radiation exposure, and they appear to be recovering much of their sharpness that was lost to them for years,” she added.

Today, Foster is concerned with the proliferation of cell towers being placed on government buildings such as offices, animal shelters and schools as well as privately owned buildings.

The mother of three, and grandmother of two, is challenging the public to demand that Congress repeal Sec. 704 the Telecommunications Act, which she says violates freedom of speech provided in the First Amendment.

“These are tough economic times,” she said. “Landlords are compensated for allowing cell towers on their buildings but they don’t have to live or work there themselves.”

She adds, “If this were benign, why has a wireless executive living in Rancho Santa Fe sheathed his entire house in copper? Copper and lead are the only two metals through which RF radiation does not penetrate.”

Foster cautions that prior to developing a tumor, most victims present neurological symptoms.

“The immune and central nervous system overlap more than any two systems in the body,” she said. “It’s a cumulative effect and depends what the dose is and the period of time exposed.”

Foster recalls a three-way friendship that developed several years ago between herself and two purported victims of cell phone radiation, Mark Hart and Gibb Brower.

“Mark was the head of an international company that manufactured cell phones,” she said. “He was given a prototype with a huge antenna. He had nocturnal seizures within six months and a glicoma within nine months. He died a week before Gibb.”

Foster says Brower lived at the base of Mt. Soledad and used a cell phone continuously for 10 years in his work as a landscaper.

“The last time I talked with Gibb was six days before his death in March 2003,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Hey, kid. You know what you have to do. You have to carry on the fight. I’ll be watching over you.”