Blacklisted radical come home: who Thode is at E.T.A.

pivotal · BACK-HISTORY; surfaced 7 Nov YDAU

• When: back-history spanning years (Winter Park FL era through the early Interdependence era); present-day standing through fall YDAU; the telling surfaces 7 Nov YDAU.
• What: Thode's road to the prorectorship: a pupil of Coach G. Schtitt back at his infamous old crop-and-epaulette Harry Hopman program in Winter Park FL, then for a couple years at the new E.T.A. a top and Show-bound — if rabidly political and not too tightly wrapped — female junior. Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family Circle professional distaff circuits after trying to organize the circuits' "more politically rabid and unwrapped players" into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would compete only in tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, and attended exclusively by registered members of the infamously unpopular early-Interdependence-era Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx, she was given the shoe and came back to Schtitt, who for historico-national reasons has always had a soft place inside for anyone even marginally politically repressed. Present-day standing: a bit on the old side for an E.T.A. prorector; regarded by the upperclassmen as probably insane by clinical standards, her coaching proficiency beyond dispute; and any closed room she's in soon develops a mysterious and overpowering vitamin-B stink. Family note, hedged: the person who ratted out the Orin-era boys' viewing plans to Schtitt was "probably Mary Esther Thode's sister Ruth, then a senior and insufferable" — a sister at E.T.A. a generation back (scene 179's recollection, two removes).