Born in 1916 in Kilwinning Alexander "Alex" Rae would go on to carve a football career not in Scotland but in the United States even at a time when the game was perhaps at its lowest. His father was an Engineer, who had also been born in the same Ayrshire but clearly with a desire to cross the Atlantic. He might have done so in 1910, shortly after marrying in 1909 and definitely did so in 1928, the family following on the following year, Alex aged fifteen so already largely football-educated. And they went to Kearny, where the young man became a Clerk, then trained as Draughtsman and in 1941 married Winifred Comstock from across the river in Newark. 

And by then he was well into a successful football career as a forward that begun in 1934 with Newark Germans, where in 1935 he was the American Soccer League's leading scorer, then Paterson Caledonian before moving to home-town Kearny Scots, there continuing to play until he was thirty in 1946 and with the team winning the American Soccer League title for five successive seasons from his joining in 1937. And that same year he also won three US caps, all against Mexico, all defeats but with him scoring twice. 

However, during the war years Alex was now working in hotel and restaurant management and it may have been this that at some point took him and Winifred to California, specifically Northridge north of Los Angeles. And it would be there that she would die in 1990 at the age of seventy-three and he eleven years later at eighty-five.