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, the Hoods, James Lennox and in this case, Roderick McDonald. He would feature in the Kearny Rangers team for two seasons from 1887 and a further one for Newark Caledonian at both centre-half, Scottish attacking centre-half, and right-half. In the first campaign his club would reach but lose the American Cup final. In the second it would lose in the semi-final and in the third defeat in the final once more. 

So who was Roddy McDonald? In fact, his origins are clear. He was born in 1865 in Tradeston but brought up in Calton and Cowlairs, Glasgow, the son of a mother from the city and a father, Charles, a boilermaker born in Greenock. But at some point or points between 1878 and 1881 Charles took the family across the Atlantic to settle in Kearny. He would die in 1898 in Jersey City. Thus it was that Roderick was about fifteen on arrival so already carrying the football contagion and just turned twenty-two when he stepped up to the local first team. 

And by then he seems to have married at eighteen, his wife Sarah, nee Walsh, also Scottish-born, and they had the first of eight children in 1884. And by then he probably already working, as he would beyond apparent retirement from football in his mid-twenties, indeed to his death, as a spinner in a thread mill, presumably Clark's. However, that passing would come young. He would die in 1911 at the age of just forty-six, Sarah outliving him by seventeen years; her death in 1928 at sixty-seven.