So, who was the first Lithuanian cum Pole cum Russian to play for the USA?  It was a Scotsman, of course!

Poland first played international football in 1921, a 1-0 defeat to Hungary in Budapest. Lithuania had its first international match in 1923, a 0-5 defeat at home but in Kaunus to Estonia. And its next game would be the following year, at the Olympic Games in Paris. It sent a squad of seventeen, was on 25th May beaten 9-0 by Switzerland in the First Round and in the overall competition finished last of twenty-two. Moreover, Poland was there too but even with twenty-two players to draw on, it didn't fare much better. The day after Lithuania it was also a First Round loser, beaten 5-0 by Switzerland and therefore twentieth overall..

It meant that in Round Two there was on the face of it neither a Litt or a Pole in sight. But not so. One player, who might today be considered either had snuck through, one of the eleven, which had defeated Estonia 1-0, he even scoring the 15th minute penalty that had made the difference. But, whilst the team for which had taken the field was the USA, his nationality was not what it seemed, at least not at birth and not twice but three times over.

Andy Stradan, sometimes Stradon or Straden, had been born in 1897 but not in America. His arrival in this World had been at 33, The Square, Hamilton Palace Colliery, Bothwell Haugh, Lanarkshire. The mining village, now largely submerged by Strathclyde Loch, was also the home of Sir Matt Busby's wife, Jean. Andy 's mother was Allana Matucities, his father, a coal miner, who signed off the birth certificate with a cross, had the first name Adam but was also known as Stadalink. At least that that was how he was recorded on his death, Adam Stadalink, still at Bothwell Haugh, aged thirty-six and from a fractured spine, sustained in a pit-accident.

You see, for there were five children, four, three boys and a girl, who survived and a boy who did not, the Bothwell Stradans' parents and two of the children were not Scots. Allana and Adam had been married in 1887 in Lodvinava, said to be in Poland but, with the border fluid and neither country then existing, both being part of the Russian Empire, perhaps Liudvinavas, now in Lithuania. And there they had at least one of the sons, Joseph, in 1897 and a daughter, Isabelle, in 1892, only after that leaving for Scotland, where Allana declared herself both Polish and Lithuanian but Adam is recorded as Lithuanian, born in "Stracka", perhaps Trakai, possibly, from a mishearing and a misunderstanding, the source of the Stradan name.

However, with Adam dead the family would struggle on in Bothwell on Joseph's labouring money before in 1909 making the decision to move on, this time to America. Joseph, having just turned twenty-one, took the boys, Lodivan (Lewis), Andrew, aged twelve so already with Scottish football knowledge, and Felix in July 1909, describing themselves now as Russians. Those borders again, and passports. Russia incidentally, its Football Association headed by a McPherson, had even by 1914 played eight internationals and by 1924 one more as the Soviet Union. Then Allana would follow on with Isabelle and a son, John, she gave birth to still in Scotland but in 1907, so Adam not the father. And they would settle in Worcester, Massachusetts, working as carpet weavers and where there was already a sizable gathering of specifically Lithuanian immigrants.

And it would be from Worcester that Andy began his "soccer" journey. By 1916, so at eighteen/nineteen he, at centre-forward, was with two of his brothers playing and scoring for Fisherville. The town of Fisherville is just south-west of Worcester itself. Then two seasons later he is living in Quincy, south of Boston, working as a Caulker and turning out for the town's Fore River Ship Yard company team. And in 1919 he is still there at 23, Beach St., now a Ship Fitter so perhaps on better, shamateur money and applying for naturalisation.

Yet by 1920 he was still a Caulker but now living in New York, presumably recruited for one of the Todd Shipyard sponsored teams. That was before moving to Philadelphia by 1923, as a labourer but now in the Fleischer's Yarn team, as it turned professional. Indeed it was from Fleischer's Yarn that he went to the Olympics, for the two games there, including Second Round defeat by the eventual gold-medallists, Uruguay, 3-0, and followed on the way home by friendlies against Poland and Ireland, four caps in all.

At this point Straden at twenty-six should have been reaching his peak but Fleischer's Yarn, having turned professional for the 1924-5 season was after finishing tenth of twelve in the American Soccer League dissolved at the end of it, despite he netting twenty in thirty-four appearances. The club had played thirty-nine games and had scored just sixty-eight goals all season. So for Andy there was then a move back to New York, to the Shawnee Indians, when they too folded to the New York Giants and then retirement in 1926 from the top-flight at not yet twenty-nine, so presumably through injury, since these were the game's boom years in the States and he should otherwise have had a good few more years in the legs.

And from then on it was a return to live in Pennsylvania once more, where he was to remain locally for the rest of his life. There in 1935 he married Stella Pommer or Platek; they would have one daughter. By 1940/41 he was working as a machinist in a steelworks and then at the Philadelphia Naval Dockyard, whilst they were living in the city at 817, West Cambria St.. In 1950 he was carpet weaving once more staying round the corner on North 9th St.. He and Stella were at some point after this divorced and his death at the age of sixty-nine in 1967 was at 3616, N. Lawrence St., less than a mile away.

But on passing his body did not remain in the City of Brotherly Love. It was taken for burial in St. John's Cemetery back in Worcester, where direct members of the family lived until relatively recently and descendants might still live. John Stradan died there in 1993. And it is this question of the settlements of Lithuanians not just there but back in Scotland, particularly in the area of Bothwell, Bellshill and Mossend. It is said that a good number of them had come from the 1870s initially as agricultural labourers but found more lucrative work cutting coal. And they clearly took to football quickly. Even today there are at least two players in the Scottish league descended from them, Jamie Barjonas and Andrew Swallow, "Swallow" being the translation of the original family name, Kregzde. And there is one still more famous player in part at least from the same stock. The Lithuanians were Catholic, they worked alongside Irish Catholics and have intermarried. And one product of this inter-mixing was Billy McNeil, born in Bellshill, the captain of Celtic, of the Lisbon Lions and of Scotland with a father clearly of Irish descent but a mother, Anele, known as Ellen or Nellie, whose own parents, from Kazis and Urzula Walatkaviczus, became Charles and Grace Mitchell.