| Finding Rays of America's Shining Soccer History |
By Roger Alloway
The afternoon of last Nov. 17, 2007, a Saturday, was a busy one in American soccer. The pro outdoor season was almost over, but plenty of games were being played at colleges and high schools, clubs and youth leagues. There also were four men standing on a sidewalk in Harrison, N.J.
The men were there for a game – or at least because of a game. They were there to honor perhaps the greatest American soccer team of the first half of the 20th century, the Bethlehem Steel soccer team, which played its first official game exactly 100 years before on a field a few feet from where the men stood.
The place that once was a soccer field now is a parking lot, the fate of many old-time soccer fields in the New York area. The lot, largely empty on this day, serves commuters who use the subway station a block away. Less than a mile away the New York Red Bulls are preparing to build a new stadium.
It’s not really much of a coincidence that Red Bull Park is being built so close to a spot where American soccer history was made. It would be hard to find a place in the West Hudson area, which includes the towns of Harrison, Kearny and East Newark, that doesn’t have some nearby connection to soccer history. For example, after standing on the corner talking about Bethlehem Steel for a half-hour, the four men drove about a mile and had lunch at a diner that’s on the site of a field in East Newark where the United States played its first game against Canada in 1885. The sites of once-famous fields and the birthplaces of once-famous players are all over the area. Finding soccer history in West Hudson is like finding military history at Gettysburg. It’s all around you.
I organized the November gathering (if four people can constitute a “gathering”) and was one of the four men. I had written an article a few months earlier for the National Soccer Hall of Fame’s website about Bethlehem Steel’s Nov. 17, 1907, debut at a field that then was called Harrison Oval. In the article, I mentioned that I would be at the site on Nov. 17, 2007, and would welcome anybody who wished to join me.
The three people who joined me were from New Jersey Youth Soccer: Jim Harrison, Rick Meana and Nelson Ramirez. I already knew Harrison, who grew up in Kearny and played soccer at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., where the Hall of Fame is situated. Before they arrived, I wondered whether there would be any takers. I would have been satisfied with only one. Then Jim appeared and said that two friends would arrive shortly, which they did.
The game that we were there to celebrate was not a distinguished one for Bethlehem—it lost 11-2. The team had played weekly pickup games against players from Allentown, Pa., but never before an official game. The Bethlehem Football Club was composed mostly of steelworkers (the word “steel” didn’t become part of the team name until 1915). They weren’t all steelworkers, however. One man (who actually wasn’t at that first game) was an unusual creature for early 20th-century American industrial soccer, a white-collar executive. Edgar Lewis, who played inside right, was the head of the accounting department at the Bethlehem Steel Corp. By the time he left there in 1930, he was the executive vice president, making almost $400,000 a year. He also made an unsuccessful attempt, after a baseball stadium built at Harrison Oval in 1915 had burned down in 1923, to buy the land for a soccer stadium.
The Bethlehem team bit off more than it could chew in November 1907. Its opponent, West Hudson AA, on whose home field the game was played, was one of the best in American soccer. The year before it had won both the American Football Association Cup, the closest thing there was to a national championship at the time, and the National Association Foot Ball League of New York and New Jersey, one of the best leagues in the country, ranking alongside leagues in New England, Chicago, St. Louis and Philadephia.
Bethlehem may have suffered a heavy defeat that day, but it went on to great things. The tournament that now is called the U.S. Open Cup was founded in the 1913-14 season, and Bethlehem won it in 1915, 1916, 1918, 1919 and 1926. It won the championship of the original American Soccer League in 1922 and 1927, and other leagues in the Middle Atlantic states in nine other years. Less well known, but maybe an even greater accomplishment, are Bethlehem Steel’s two undefeated streaks of 41 games each, the first between January 1914 and February 1915 and the second between November 1915 and December 1916.
Ten Bethlehem Steel players are members of the National Soccer Hall of Fame. They include five of the 16-man first induction group in 1950. Among those five is Archie Stark, who scored 75 goals for Bethlehem Steel in its 1924-25 season and was perhaps the greatest player in pre-World War II American soccer. Although he didn’t put on a Bethlehem uniform for the first time until a dozen years after that 1907 game, he is part of the soccer history that is all around in West Hudson. His family moved there from Scotland in 1909, when he was 12 years old, and for most of the rest of his life he lived in Kearny, which was known as a “Little Scotland.”
The Bethlehem Steel team was disbanded in 1930, the victim of a variety of forces that included the October 1929 stock market crash and the “Soccer War” of 1928 and ’29, an administrative battle between the United States Football Association (the organization that became the USSF) and the American Soccer League.
My visit to Harrison on Nov. 17 was the second stop on the historical tour that I took that day. A few hours before, in Bethlehem, Pa., about 75 miles away, I walked past Steel Field, where the Bethlehem Steel team played from 1916 to 1930. Unlike the field in Harrison, the one in Bethlehem is still there, serving as Moravian College’s football stadium. The grandstand, which holds about 1,000 spectators, was refurbished by Moravian a few years ago and looks very much the way it did when the Bethlehem Steel Corp. built it in 1916.
Although Steel Field is now used for a different sport, it is quite easy to imagine what it was like in its halcyon soccer days. That’s not as easy at Harrison Oval. Soccer history may be all around you, but so are cement walls, chain-link fences and piles of steel beams where buildings are being torn down. Still, if you are going to take an interest in the American soccer of 100 years ago, you have to get used to that sort of cityscape. It may obscure the view a bit, but in Harrison, Kearny, Fall River, Philadelphia and places like them, soccer shines through if you know where to look.
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