The year was 1913, the place Milwaukee and three clubs formed a formal league. They were, more than likely a representation of their ethics origins, the Vikings, the Sons of St. George and the Caledonians. The following year two more teams, McWhytes from Kenosha, its rope-wire factory having opened in 1912, and Horlicks, the drink, based on its manufacturing plant in Racine, joined and it was that same year that the Wisconsin State Football Association was founded with St. Andrew's, again Scots perhaps, replacing Vikings. Its first president and immediate instigator of the Adult Wisconsin State Challenge Cup, later the Wisconsin Challenge Cup and played for until 2004, was James Frew.

 James Frew was a doctor, a physician. And at the age of forty-four he was also unlikely to have been a player. Although once he might well have been, not least because of his own origins. Born in 1870 he had probably arrived in the USA in 1874/5 with his father, also James, a baker, born in perhaps Ayrshire otherwise Kilsyth, his mother Catherine nee McIver, a Gael, born in Stornoway, and a younger brother, Angus. In that year they are recorded living in Brooklyn, where a third son, John, just born an American. On that basis it makes it unlikely that wee Jimmy, despite having been born in Glasgow, would have been caught up in the arrival and explosion of the beautiful game north of the border. However, there was a twist. The family did not stay. They went home only to return. In 1881 James Snr, Catherine, James Jnr, Angus but perhaps sadly no John are back on the banks of the Clyde. James Snr is now a foreman baker in Blackfriars.

But he and they did not settle. James Snr would become a naturalised American in Massachusetts in 1887 and give his new arrival dates in his now permanent home as both 1882 and 1884. It would mean that James Jnr, known to have re-arrived in 1883, would then have been thirteen and therefore with every likelihood of having been caught up not just as an enthusiast but a young player in the football contagion that had swept through not just Glasgow but Scotland's Central Belt in the interim. It would be in Massachusetts too, in Cambridge just outwith Boston, that in 1892 James Jnr, apparently James Wallace, would marry Carrie Megroth but before the decade was out the family, indeed the wider family, would move westward. Angus Frew too would train as a doctor, marry in  Maine and practice there, in Ohio and finally Indiana. James Snr and Catherine in 1920 and old age can be found living in Milwaukee, James Wallace and Carrie having recently arrived there via Kentucky. Their daughter had been born in the Bluegrass State in 1897, whilst James registered with the Milwaukee Medical College in 1899.

But back to 1914 and beyond. On the entry of the USA into the Great War James Wallace served in the military, stepping back in 1919. In 1920, now forty-nine, he had returned to civil practice but himself was to die relatively young, still in Milwaukee, in 1927 and aged only fifty-seven. Meantime, in 1923 the Wisconsin State Soccer Football League with again eleven teams had come into being, now embracing not just the obvious Scots impetus and Frew-input of the pre-War years, which I note is not obviously recognised in the state Hall of Fame, but the many, newly-arriving German and other immigrants to city and state alike.