 YOU finally get a handle on Everton's 127 years of extraordinary existence when you realise - with a start - that when this infant in blue and white took its first, tentative steps, Jesse James was still robbing banks and stagecoaches in the Wild West while, just two years before, General George Armstrong Custer and his force of 260 men had died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Even gazing steadily at the oh-so sombre faces of the players who turned out for this fledgling club in 1878, doesn't quite bring to life these forerunners of such as Ball, Harvey and Kendall who plied their trade on the green acres of Stanley Park and field close at hand. Unlike Jesse James and Wyatt Earp - also alive at that time - these early soccer missionaries seem like figures from a wax museum, whereas cinema made enduring flesh and blood of every Western gunman, whether desperado or lawman. Almost all these early Evertonians seem to wear walrus moustaches - ladies hopefully excepted - with the odd,, often extremely odd, handlebar moustache adding to the fun. Beetle brows were also the rage, and no player appears to be under 40, or capable of smiling. You look at them, think of the glamour of present-day soccer stars with their expensively coiffed locks, their financial managers, their property portfolios, and try, unsuccessfully, to relate it to Everton's first gate receipts of 14 shillings - around 70p - raised from a game at Priory Road. Forty-five pounds from a whole season, barely enough to give Duncan Ferguson bidding rights on a champion pigeon. In the beginning, of course, was the word from St Domingo's. And the word was small. In 1878, the church formed a football section. A year later the young team, which played in blue and white, called itself Everton, after the district in which it then lived, and pasted the first glitter on a star name. To start with, they trod the grass of Stanley Park, the players carting the goalposts across the road and placing them in position. They stayed for four seasons, but needed gate money and moved on to Priory Road - to dressing rooms and a primitive stand - where the club landed its first silverware, the Liverpool Cup. What happened next was, indirectly, the making of the club. Everton's overexuberant supporters - well, the goals were flowing in these innocent pre-zonal defensive days - got them evicted from Priory Road and president John Houlding - a former Lord Mayor - offered them a new home on - curses!! - Anfield Road. And, yes, every Everton greybeard knows the story from here. | 
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