Kearny
- Scotstoun USA
(Much aided and abetted by and with huge thanks to Tom McCabe, son of Soccer town and all-round football aficionado and expert, to the Scots-American Club and its hospitality and to Marge Santos, grand-daughter of Archie Stark with a muito obrigado to Larry, her husband.)
This is a story of men and machines or rather machines and men, without either of which football might never have come and certainly not come to stay in Kearny, where football, the game played "wi' yer fit no yer hund", is king and has been for almost a century and a half. It arrived in the 1880s and took off almost immediately, seemed to fade in the 1890s, was reinvigorated in the new century, unlike elsewhere did not crash completely in the 1930s and in the late 1980s rose again with, like a reworking of the old Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman joke, a Scot, a Uruguayan and an Italian. The machines in question, textile machines in the main but not exclusively, were installed over a twenty year period in a series of mills and factories by men, who like the equipment came from Britain, some of whom stayed and some returned. And they were followed to mind them by men and women, many of them Scots, working-class Scots, arriving in what was then a a small New Jersey town and is now an East Jersey suburb to satisfy demand for first cotton-thread, then floor-coverings, sewing machines, jute sacks and sails.
So back to the joke. The Scotsman was John Harkes, the Uruguayan Tab Ramos and the Italian Tony Meola, a goalkeeper and two midfielders, all, if not born in Kearny, then raised there and all three forming much of the spine of the US team at the 1994 World Cup. It would seem on the face of it that it was sheer serendipity, that they came seemingly out of nowhere, but they were in fact the product of a long and continuing soccer history that had begun about 1880 but officially in January 1883. That was the date to satisfy increasing demand of the opening just west of Kearny of a new mill the Clark Thread Co. had built. It was followed in November by the formation of Clarks ONT sports club, the first President of which was not entirely coincidentally Campbell Clark, the vice-president, William Clark Jnr, and by 1884 the captain of football, R. Clark, in fact Robert K. Clark.
Campbell Clark was in fact William Campbell Clark, a member of the family from Paisley that owned the World's second largest or was it largest cotton thread business. It had set up its Newark factory two decades earlier and was now expanding literally across the Passaic River from Newark and its old works. Hence the need for new textile machinery. He had been born in 1863 in Scotland, in Paisley itself. He had arrived in the United States perhaps in 1879, probably in 1880 and certainly by 1881 and effectively he never went back. He married in Newark in 1886, died and was buried there in 1912 and in November 1883 had been just twenty years old.
William Clark Jnr was also born in Paisley, but in 1857. There in 1861 his father, also William, was the Manager of a Thread Mill, a cotton thread mill. Which one is not clear. However, by 1870 William Snr was now the Superintendent of a Thread Factory and in Newark, the Clark mill, and young, thirteen year-old William was with him, his wife and his other children. In 1880 they were still there William Clark Snr still at the Thread Mill and
his son a machinist. However, five years later he had followed in his father's footsteps as ONT Factory Supervisor before moving away to
Westerley in Rhode Island, there working first as a Thread Mill Agent, then Manager once more of the
Clark company's second American facility
opened in 1892. And, whilst in between in 1883/4, just twenty-five and twenty-six and playing football on the left-wing for the ONT factory team, it would be in Westerley's Bend River Cemetery, although he died in Manhattan, that William Clark Jnr, effectively "Father of American Soccer", is laid to rest.
However, these two Clarks were not related. They were simply from families who shared a surname, a hometown and a business. One owned it. The other make it function. But the third Clark, Robert, was related, at least to one of them for he was William Clark Jnr's younger brother. Again born in Paisley he actually spent most of his childhood in New Jersey, had probably just left the wee university down the road, Princeton, where cycling had been his sport but was also clearly bitten by the football bug. Although he would go on also to manage thread mills in another American soccer hot-spot,
Fall River
in Massachusetts, in 1883 aged twenty-two, perhaps twenty-three, he was learning the business with his father and brother and from full-back captaining that same new works team.
Thus it was that football in Kearny owed much of its early impulse off the field not to one person, not even to one Clark but three, all Paisley and therefore Scots-born. It might be therefore be assumed that it was a Scots club. Certainly to begin with it seemed to be just that. It played its first football in February 1884, against an obviously Scots influenced Caledonian Thistle team from nearby Paterson with its silk mills. Diasporan contacts work. That game was followed a week later by one against New York and in it the Kearny XI took the field, with both Clark brothers in the line-up and using the Scottish 2.2.6 formation with its block-four defence. At the time it would have been almost standard in much of Scotland and certainly in West Scotland and therefore Paisley. After all had not the Scottish international team been the most successful of the previous decade so why should Clarks America be different?
Yet looks can be deceiving. Clark ONT, ONT standing for Our New Thread, the company's latest product and the first example of football and overt advertising in combination, sponsorship, if you like, was a multi-sports club. It also played baseball and cricket, founded as it was at a meeting attended by some one hundred and fifty employees of a mill complex that was still recruiting. Thus by dint of sheer size it immediately became THE club, one able both to provide organisational impulse for all its participants and in football specifically at least initially to dominate. It was a founder member of the American Football Association, first President James Grant, formed at the Caledonian Hall in New York City in the same year it began playing, 1884. It won the first American Cup in 1885 defeating New York, won it again in 1886, beating neighbouring Kearny Rangers, the "town" team made up of workers in the other locals works, also winning the local baseball title in between but being less successful at cricket. And it would take the American Cup once more in 1887 again defeating Kearny, whilst meanwhile in 1885 and 1886 under the auspices the AFA it had sponsored two games against Canadian representative teams led by another Diasporan Scot,
David Forsyth, a loss and a win, with in the first ONT providing five of the players, including the captain, one linesman, William Clark himself, the referee, Kearny providing four more of the team and the match itself taking place Clark Field, the company's specially-built ground just beside its mill and non-playing Campbell Clark and family contribution to the venture.
However, even by the middle of the decade the Clark winning teams was not Scots. They were British at best and even then possibly not entirely so. 1884 had seen a large number of new arrivals, not least from the cotton-spinning towns of Lancashire and seemingly from Ireland. The team that took the field for the 1885 American Cup final was Hughes, Holden and Donnelly, Joe Swithenby, Howarth and Smith, Garron, William Thornton, Jack Swithenby, the captain, Swarbrick and McGurk and it was much changed even from the first round, when William Clark had been at left-wing. The stars of the team were the Swithenbys brothers. They hailed from the English footballing hot-spot of Bolton. John Howarth, also captain of cricket, was also English-born, whilst Harry Holden and William Thornton were perhaps born locally. And the team would soon further show its English, indeed Lancastrian influence by lining up in the formation now being played in and by England, 2.3.5 . In fact the New York team they beat in the final that first year and its opponents in the semi-final, Kearny Rangers, appear far more Scots both in names and formation. New York consisted of Walker, Johnston and Marsterton, Sinclair, Gold and Mitchell, Young, Lowe, Grant, Sinclair and McNeil, the Rangers of Ferguson, W. Hood and Morris, John Hood, Lennox, Raeburn, Hill, Bolton, Ashley, Taylor and Milner, whilst, although New York would soon also adopt 2.3.5, Kearny took a little longer still employing 2.2.6 until 1886, almost precisely mirroring the same changes taking place three thousand miles in the Scottish game and with the Scottish national team itself.
Thus said, given the sheer size of the Clark Mill and the other Kearny factories their dominance of emergent football might have been expected to continue for some years but from 1887 both ONT and Kearny Rovers seem to have entered a period apparently of increasing instability and certainly of gradual marginalisation. Due to play Trenton in the first round of the American Cup in 1888 ONT had a walkover but in the second was soundly beaten by another New Jersey, the Almas. That cup was won by Massachusetts' Fall River Rovers, which had knocked out Kearny Rangers in the semi-final. And in 1889 the cup winner was the same, with this time ONT defeated in the semi-final and Kearny not taking part all. Then, although in 1890 both were there once more, ONT was largely a new team, whilst much of its old team, Swithenbys et al, were taking the field for its local rival and finishing as losing finalists. And worse was to come. In 1891 ONT withdrew before the competition started and Kearny was beaten in the preliminary rounds, after which from 1892 to 1898, the last year the cup would be competed for for seven seasons, neither was to feature, at least in the any of the finals.
However, the hiatus seems to have allowed in East Newark a regathering of strength and reinforcement from recently-retired, Scottish international Jimmy Adams formally of Hearts, Everton and St. Bernard's. He arrived in Kearny in 1901 and appears to have lived out the rest of his days there, becoming janitor of the footballing hotbed then and still that is the local High School, dying in the town in 1943 an buried there too. Thus when the American Cup resumed in 1906 it was won by West Hudson AA. It would win it again in 1908 and 1912, West Hudson being East Newark viewed from the opposite direction. And in between in 1907 the winner was Clark AA, Clark ONT re-branded, Campbell Clark still alive and running the company, and its team beating Kearny Scots, Kearny Rovers also re-branded. Moreover, in 1910 Kearny Scots were again runners-up with in 1909 West Hudson Clark AA, once more Clark ONT re-branded, also losing finalists.
However, it was to be Clark's last hurrah, perhaps not unconnected with Campbell Clark's death just two years later and therefore the loss of his almost three decades of involvement and support, not least financial. And it was perhaps also Campbell Clark's death that in retrospect marked the passing on of Kearny's footballing crown. It became the property not of the mill per se but of the town itself and, moreover, if anything, more Scots. The reason was that, meanwhile, from a family newly arrived to take up residence and from one that was established and already had Kearny footballing pedigree three stars of the future, two of them cousins, were emerging.
Clark ONT's first goalkeeper had been J. Douglas, in fact James Edward Douglas. In spite of his black-gray name he was English, from Lancashire, a cotton carder, who had come to the town in 1883 just as the Clark Mill opened. He had arrived with his wife and children the third of which, the first boy, was David, named after his grandfather. David would marry in Kearny and in turn name his son after his grandfather and James Edward Douglas Jnr would grow up to be 6ft 2ins and also perfect goalie material. Born in 1898 he would start his career between the sticks in 1922 with nearby Harrison and eight teams later after 195 appearances would finish it in 1931 with the New York Americans having been in 1924 the US goalkeeper at the Paris Olympics and winning nine caps for his country, including the 1925 match against Canada and at the 1930 World Cup. Meanwhile, eight months after Jimmy in November 1898 another boy came into the same family. He wasn't a Douglas. He was a Brown and a Diasporan Scot. His father, John, had arrived from Scotland in 1890 and met and married Jane Douglas, David Douglas's elder sister and young James's aunt. Now Jimmy as the elder cousin must have got all the food because Davey Brown, not doubt named after his uncle, was an altogether different package. He claimed on later passport applications to be 5ft 6ins but is widely reported as just 5ft 3ins tall. It is not surprising that he had no future between the posts but he grew up to be some player and, in spite of his size, a forward and a very good one. At seventeen he was already playing first team football. Until twenty-five he turned out for a number of local sides and was then picked up by the New York Skeeters but it was with the New York Giants from 1924 to 1930 that he really made his mark. In 213 games he scored 165 goals and in the 1926-27 season topped the scoring list with fifty-two goals in thirty eight appearances., three every two fixtures. He also scored in two of his three US international caps, in the first of which his cousin was the 'keeper, and at the age of thirty-three re-joined the New York Giants as the replacement for John Nelson, when he was injured and forced to retire. He had himself recovered from an injury that had prevented him from going to the World Cup with cousin Jim but some clouds have silver linings. The break would extend Brown's club career. He did not retire from the top-flight until the age of thirty-seven, after which he returned to Kearny, dying there aged seventy-one in 1970. Cousin Jimmy died the following year.
As for the newbies, the new arrivals, they had come from Glasgow, arriving in Kearny in 1910. They are the Starks and they are still there. Two of the Stark boys played football, Jimmy born in 1895 and Archie in 1896. Both would go on to play, not for Scotland but the USA alongside both Jimmy Douglas and Davey Brown, and Archie would become one of the most prolific players the World has ever seen and in his time probably its best-paid. He had arrived in America in May 1912, aged fifteen, the following season joining Kearny Scots, Rovers that was, where he stayed until 1916, winning the American Cup in 1915 before he was twenty. He then played a season, clearly as a shamateur, with the works team, Babcock & Wilcox, in Bayonne in southern New Jersey, the company being where another ex-Scottish international, Bob Findlay, had arrived just two years prior after a thirteen year professional footballing career in the home country and the town being where he too would see out the rest of his days. Dying in 1926 he would live to see his son, William, Kilmarnock-born, play for the USA at the 1924 Olympics in France, defeated in the second round by the eventual gold-medallists, Uruguay, but not in 1928 in Holland, thrashed, 11-2, in the first round by eventual runners-up, Argentina. Stark meanwhile returned as soccer stuttered due to the war to West Hudson and then having already been called up for the RAF, enlisted with the US Forces, was posted to the Aviation Section Signal Corps, and in February 1918 sailed for service in Europe.
Archie Stark, Archibald Macpherson Stark, returned to America in October 1919, briefly joined Paterson F.C., the successor to the Caledonians, married and then played two seasons for Erie F.C., a Kearny team named not after a large lake but the local railroad, and, having joined the
Bethlehem Steel
touring party to Scandinavia in 1919, incidentally again with Davey Brown, from there it was once more out and up. In 1921 he was recruited by the New York Field Club, from the wing scoring forty-five times in sixty-nine games over three years. It was a period when Kearny teams faded from national view. None had featured in either of the major Cups, the American and the National Challenge, since 1922. It was a period too when it looks as if Stark toyed with the idea of returning to Scotland. He was there in the summers of 1923 and 1924. That he did not was probably due to
Alex Jackson. In the 1923-24 season Jackson had, after a season with Dumbarton in the Scottish Second Division, starred for Bethlehem at the age of just eighteen. He had arrived with his brother, Wattie, previously a centre-forward with Kilmarnock. Then for the 1924 -25 season they had both signed for Aberdeen. The only problem was that both in moving from Scotland to Bethlehem and then back they had not bothered to tell any of the clubs. Therefore at the beginning of the 1924 season Bethlehem found itself short of two players. In reaction it turned to Stark, recalled from Scotland as the replacement for Alex Jackson but quickly converted to centre-forward as cover for Wattie. The rest is history. Internationally he would net five times in just two appearances, both in 1925. In club football in two-hundred and twenty-one games over the six seasons from 1924 he score two-hundred and forty goals and in doing so in 1924 set a season's record of sixty-seven goals in forty-four games. That 1924 total was equalled by Gerd Mueller in 1972-73 and finally eclipsed but not quite beaten in 2011-12 by a certain Lionel Messi with 91 in total, 64 in domestic competition. Messi's sheer numbers are bigger but the goals were scored in more games too. A truer measure is the goals per games ratio and Archie Stark still has that by a wide margin.
However, for all the glamour of its seemingly large clubs the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the Depression that quickly followed would rapidly expose the chimera that was the American, top-flight game. Bethlehem Steel folded in 1930 its company subsidy withdrawn. Other teams went the same way in short order and Archie Stark's playing career from then on perhaps best demonstrates soccer's realities. After a brief flirt with Fall River Marksmen before it also imploded he returned home, that is he went back to Kearny, where he and the game had roots, and where his granddaughter still lives. For two seasons he turned out for Newark Americans, just back across the Passiac River and when it too seems to have rolled over he re-crossed the water and played for a season more with home-town Kearny Irish.
By then in 1934 Stark was thirty-seven and an extraordinary playing career had come to a natural end. Kearny football, however, continued. 1935 saw its Scots-Americans reach the final of the National Challenge Cup. It was the first time for almost two decades that a Kearny club had gone so far. And it would get better. In 1937 two Kearny clubs reached and lost two separate Challenge Cup semi-finals with Archie's son, Billy, one of the rising, if local, stars. In 1939 the Scots-Americans would reach the quarter-finals with Kearny Scots going a round further the following season and again in 1942, 1943, 1944. In the American Soccer League the town's presence had also continued. Kearny Scots had been champions for four years from 1938, would be runners-up in 1948 and 1952. Kearny Irish would take second spot in 1950 and 1951, at which point both it and Scots dropped out of the that league. Yet neither would fold, far from it. Both continue to this day playing in the North Jersey Soccer League at Harvey Field, where Kearny High School also play, the same Kearny High School that produced Harkes and Meola with Harkes and Ramos also turning out for the local Thistles club. And the conveyor belt continued and continues. Also in the midfield of the 1994 US World Cup team was Claudio Reyna. the son of an Argentine father and a Portuguese mother. He was born on the other side of Newark to Harkes, whose son, Ian, currently has returned to Scotland and plays from Dundee United, Meola and Ramos but went to the same school in the city as the last of the three, St. Benedicts; the same school as would be attended by Thomas McCabe, currently turning out for Notre Dame University and the son of Tom McCabe, now Kearny's football guru and, he tells me, one-time goalkeeper for the same wee university just down the road that a century earlier had been Robert Clark's alma mater. Princeton that is.