Cyrus Alban Allen, nicknamed Jack, was born on October 2, 1855, in Girard, Pennsylvania, where he picked up the sport of baseball at a very young age. After attending the Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, Allen debuted as a third baseman with the Syracuse Stars baseball team on May 1, 1879. That year he also played sixteen games for the Cleveland Blues of the National League, but after this season he played no more major league baseball.
Allen then attended Penn’s dental school, but there is no record that he played baseball while at Penn. After graduating with a D.D.S. degree in 1880, he practiced dentistry in Buffalo with his father, traveled to Alaska on a mining expedition in 1898, and later returned to Girard to grow fruit. He suffered from a long illness and later died at McKinley Hospital on April 21, 1915, at the age of fifty nine.