The Beginning of the Beginning of The Legend of Stabby Myrvang

Or: An endorsement of functional water systems.

Everett Flabbergasters icon Rutherford Myrvang was born on May 13th, 1901 in Ballard, Washington. This made him six years older than the annexation of Ballard by Seattle. It also made him two years older than the Ballard Cow Ordinance and three years younger than the Ballard Pukey Swedes.

This ordinance was ordinated — a real word, shut up — when he was a toddler to combat one of the city’s two primary challenges, one which humankind has faced since time immemorial: cow shit.

The second of the two challenges was human shit.

A third bonus challenge was that Ballard was dominated by Scandinavians whose natural inclination over any proposal was to disagree with each other, rabble-rouse over said disagreement, and then conclude by forgetting what it was they disagreed about but, for safe measure, thwacking each other on the head with a shoe.

Subsequently, the growing-too-big-too-fast Ballard was filled with a population of dry heavers and often even wet heavers as diseases ran wild, diseases that we thought until recently were all made up for the iconic 1980s computer game Oregon Trail. I mean, really, “dysentery”? How were we supposed to know that was real?

Adding insult to injury, the year after Myrvang’s birth was a year where Ballard for the life of itself couldn’t stop catching on fire. These fires were then extra difficult to put out due to the dysfunctional water system overflowing with cow turds and garbage, not to mention the fact that at any given moment a bunch of the healthy young folks expected to put out the fires would be keeled over, upchucking and crapping their pants in quick succession.

So to summarize, you pretty much had a metric shitload of Scandinavians, running around with their houses and cedar mills and fishing boats on fire, trying to put them out with poo water, and spewing chunks all over the place.

And that’s how the baseball club known as the Ballard Pukey Swedes became known as the Ballard Pukey Swedes.

Ironically, the Pukey Swedes were made up of few-to-no Swedes, but rather Norwegians — who, in fairness, were still puking more than the national average, or at least would have been were that a census measurement.

This group of Norwegians joined forces with a handful of Japanese players — mostly fellow marine and mill workers — who’d trek up from their Seattle homes in Nihonmachi. And thus racism in America was solved: Immigrants from northern Europe and immigrants from East Asia coming together, united in their joy of pointing and laughing at other, even blonder immigrants from northern Europe for being unable to control their sphincters on either ends. Lol jk. (About the “solving racism” thing because ope would ya look at that it turned out non-white people were really not allowed to live in many places and were discriminated against for jobs and loans — not “lol jk” about poop and barf being hilarious. That’s still true.)

The end result was that, for the first five or so years of the century, teams would often find themselves making the trip to Ballard only to discover the Pukey Swedes had to forfeit the game on account of none of their players could get out of fetal position. Subsequently, they had a disastrous 84-216 record before 1906 rolled around — and half the wins were forfeits by other teams who by this point just figured the game was toast anyway due to another outbreak of cholera or what have you, and couldn’t be assed to get off their couch to confirm. Eventually they got in the habit of sending a confirmation telegram in advance; this however was tricky because Morse code didn’t have any way to transcribe Ballard’s usual response, which was just the sound of retching.

Yet on the rare occasion when enough Ballardites could stop vomming for long enough to field a full team for nine innings, they were actually quite alright at it.

And this was the first baseball that Rutherford Myrvang ever saw.

As it turns out, as a child in early 1900s Ballard there weren’t all that many offerings. I mean, they didn’t even have video games, not even the 1980s icon, Oregon Trail. Your options were generally baseball, cigarette addiction, or building homemade explosives. The latter was actually the Myrvang children’s first love and would earn Rutherford’s older sister the nickname “Splodey” after she accidentally blew up their neighbor’s east wall as a child (and in the process sparked another one of Ballard’s fires that left the next-door house reeking of dung water for months).

Theoretically the only pastime option that was neither “baseball” nor “crimes” was marbles, but children even then realized they were pretty much bullshit and would continue to feel this way until the invention of LSD.

So baseball it would be.

Rutherford and Splodey (real name: Ragnhild) spent most weekends at the Ballard ballpark, where admission for children was one quarter of an eighth of a half of a cent and came with a free lutefisk for kids under 12. Originally this promotion gave youngsters a free dried cod with admission, but the hordes of children eventually got tired of trying to gnaw through what was essentially fish-scented drywall, and instead turned to hitting each other in the face with it. Lutefisk, with its soft, spongey texture, was a much safer option and this switch resulted in a decrease by 300% of childhood concussions.

Shockingly, at the time children actually enjoyed lutefisk, something inconceivable to modern readers. This would last until roughly 1930 or so, when better foods came along like Airheads, or Tums.

The Ballard uniforms had a palette of blue, slightly darker blue, and an accent Pantone would call “Technically Kind Of Crimson.” This was because, like all sports teams of the time, it was before colors were invented. As a result everyone just ran around in slightly mismatching hues — in the Pukey Swedes’ case, the Mister Pibb-knockoff version of red.

As a wee child, Rutherford’s room that he shared with Ragnhild was decorated with one Ballard Pukey Swedes pennant, colors consistently just a bit off no matter how one adjusted the lighting.

Rutherford Myrvang loved the Ballard Pukey Swedes. And being in relative proximity, the Ballard Pukey Swedes did not like the Everett Flabbergasters.

So when in 1918 he made his Ballard debut, aged 17 and batting ninth in the order as a call-up decked in blue and not-quite-red, Rutherford Myrvang hated the Everett Flabbergasters.

Sources. More sources. Even more sources. One more source.