When football began in Kearny and therefore soccer in the USA a few names stand out as featuring as players and/or officials or administrators. Amongst them are, of course, the Clarks, the Clarks of Paisley, but there are also Robert Raeburn, Dave Ferguson, Roderick McDonald, the Hoods and James Lennox.

For James Lennox it began as a player. When in November 1884 in the second round and semi-final of the newly constituted American Cup his team, Kearny Rangers met and was defeated 0-4 in neighbouring Newark by New York, he was captain and centre-half. And as in the following February New York was in turn beaten to the trophy by the Kearny rival to his club he was referee. Moreover, in November 1885 he at right-half was in the unofficial team that faced Canada and the following season back in American Cup he was at right-back for the Rangers in the first round, again in the second and once more, and as captain in the final, albeit lost to the holders.  

However, for the following and third playing of the Cup he was neither playing nor officiating as his club again reached the final only to lose once more to Clark ONT. In fact he did not reappear until 1893 by when the role of the referee had changed. To 1891 the referee had sat in the stand as the arbiter, should the captains and the two umpires on the pitch fail to agree. From 1891 the two umpires essentially became the linesmen and the referee descended to ground level and took the whistle as ultimate arbiter in situ. Thus James on his return was now on the field-of-play, when he took the whistle for a single game that 1893-4 season, again had a fallow 1894-5 but was back with a vengeance in 1895-6 when he took both a semi-final and the final, won by Paterson True Blues. Moreover, from the first round of the 1896-7 competition he seemed again to the official of first choice. Three of the first round match-ups were his. Yet that was it. He was to be seen no more that season or the next as the freeze of economic depression hit the game under American Football Association jurisdiction and for the next eight years there was essentially hibernation.        

So who was James Lennox, player, referee old-style and also new-style and as an almost incognito cog on-field and off- in the machinery of early American soccer as both a chaser of the leather and a controller of the mayhem. In truth there are a few tenuous candidates but one, or rather two combined, in particular stands out as at least possible. He had arrived in America at twenty, born in 1859 in Glassford in Lanarkshire but having moved as a child to Calton in Glasgow. He was with his siblings and widowed mother, his father, a stonemason having died in 1876, was or certainly became a carpenter to trade, had married Elizabeth Thornton in 1884 in Newark and they had their first child in 1886, which would explain he stepping back as a player at that time.

But he was soon to be a widower. Elizabeth would pass away, not yet thirty, in about 1889 and perhaps in child-birth. Thus in 1900 he was a widower, living with now his two children and mother-in-law, with in the meantime time to recover his wife's death and, although now well into his thirties, re-devote some time and energy to the game. 

However, with the children growing up he would remarry, his new wife Rose Wanstall, with whom he would start a second family. But Rose too would die relatively young, at 52 in 1925, their children in their teens and by 1930, two years before his death in 1932, James was staying with his now married daughter still in the adopted hometown. And that is were it assumed that he, Elizabeth and Rose are quietly buried.