They told him there was no way a political newcomer, and a Democrat besides, could win the seat in the leafy suburbs west of Chicago that had been held by Dennis Hastert for 20 years. Hastert was so Republican his party made him speaker of the House of Representatives.

They told Bill Foster that he couldn't win, but they didn't know that years ago, Foster and his brother, Fred Foster, started a stage lighting company in Madison in the basement of Fred's flat with $500 and some big dreams. The brothers were attending UW-Madison at the time.

One day Bill announced that the time would come when the New York Metropolitan Opera would be using the brothers' lighting system.

"We saw that as the top of the hill," Bill was recalling Friday.

Almost everyone scoffed.

It didn't happen right away, but some time later Fred Foster called his brother Bill to tell him the company, which is called Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC), had just signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera.

"He was jubilant, " Bill said.

Today Middleton-based ETC, which Fred still runs, has more than 650 employees and is a global leader in the field of entertainment and architectural lighting. They light Broadway shows and Disney theme parks, Las Vegas hotels and the set of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "

On Saturday, March 8, in a result the New York Times called "stunning, " Bill Foster won a special election for the Illinois congressional seat opened by Hastert's midterm resignation. Foster won 53 percent of the vote to Republican James D. Oberweis' 47 percent. He was sworn in March 11.

In a very real sense, partial credit for Foster's victory should go to his late father, G.W. "Bill " Foster. He showed his son it was OK to switch careers and follow your heart.

The elder Foster was a beloved figure at the UW-Madison Law School. When he died in 2002, at 82, the faculty passed a memorial resolution praising his work for civil rights and the desegregation of public schools around the country. It referred to Foster as "an outstanding teacher " and "a delight as a friend and a colleague. "

But he had originally been trained as a chemist, a field he had second thoughts about after seeing the spread of chemical weapons during wartime.

The faculty resolution praising Foster noted that he once explained his change of course (he got a law degree at Georgetown) by saying: "It's my personal conviction that the central problem of our time is political -- the job of folks getting along with other folks by argument and compromise instead of by A-bombs and rampant bacteria. Teaching is one of the better ways to egg people into thinking politically -- and being in politics is the only practical way to participate in working this thing out. "

This week, explaining his decision to enter politics at 50 years of age, Bill Foster said: "My father had a similar trajectory. "

Bill's own path -- with his brother Fred running ETC -- took him to Harvard and a doctorate degree in physics. In 1984, Bill went to work doing scientific research at Fermilab, which is located in the Chicago suburbs and is home to the world's most powerful particle accelerators. He was highly successful, but in 2006, after this last child headed off to college, Foster was restless. He explained it by saying that for years he had read his morning newspaper with increasing dismay at the state of the country. Finally it had become impossible to just fold up the newspaper and forget about it.

Foster stepped away from his life's work, and -- talk about taking a flyer -- moved to Pennsylvania to try to help an underdog Democratic congressional candidate named Patrick Murphy unseat a Republican incumbent. Foster said later he worked weeks of 14-hour days on the campaign, learning all the time, and in the end Murphy pulled out an upset victory.

Foster told me Friday that he subsequently worked for a time in Murphy's Washington office, then returned to Illinois, where he announced he would challenge Hastert. "I was pretty much a voice in the wilderness, " he said, but then last year Hastert announced he would not seek re-election.

That gave Foster a chance, though he was still an underdog Democrat in a Republican district. In the end, Foster's call for change -- better health care, and an end to the war -- carried the day.

It wasn't coincidence that Bill's brother Fred brought a photo of their father to the swearing in.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.