He was the
son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant, Bernard Berg, who became a pharmacist.
He had purchased a newly-built corner house at 108 Roseville Avenue in 1908 and
opened a drug store on the ground floor with living quarters upstairs.
Bernard worked the
drug store 15 hours a day, seven days a week in the middle-class neighborhood
and communicated with his family upstairs through a speaking tube. He did
not actively practice his religion.
Morris was the
youngest of Bernard's three children, born in 1902.
1 There was an older
brother, Samuel, later a Newark doctor, and an older sister, Ethel, later a
Newark teacher.
Morris attended South
Eighth Street School, and later Barringer High School.
Morris had graduated
from Barringer at the age of 16
2 in 1918 at the top of his class. He had
starred on the Barringer High baseball team as a third baseman and had been
named by the Newark Star-Eagle, then a Newark afternoon paper, to an all-city
team of the best players from Newark's high and prep schools.
Among his
classmates at Barringer, he was known more for excellence as a student than as
an athlete, and graduated with honors.
He went on to
Princeton, in an era when Princeton was not known to be favorable to Jewish
students. There he majored in languages. He studied seven languages,
including Sanskrit. He also played baseball on a Princeton team that was
one of the best in its history. Upon graduating magna cum laude in 1923,
the 6-foot, 185-pound Berg was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers as "Moe
Berg."
He enjoyed a 15-year
career in professional baseball with five different major-league teams, the
Brooklyn Dodgers, the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Indians, the Washington
Senators, and the Boston Red Sox. 3
Along the way, he
also attended the Sorbonne in Paris where he studied philosophy, and Columbia
Law School in 1926, where he earned a law degree and took advanced language
studies.
When he took his New
York State bar exam, he was one of 33 of the more than 500 applicants who passed
and had the second best score. He was briefly associated with a Wall
Street law firm.
Coaching in Japan
In 1932, Berg took
leave of absence from big league baseball and went to Japan, where he coached
baseball to the Tokyo Six Baseball League.
4 In advance of his trip he had
learned to speak Japanese.
In the course of his
coaching time in Japan, Berg had his movie camera with him and did extensive
filming of the Tokyo skyline and landmarks from one of the city's tallest
buildings. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, Berg made his amateur films
available to the U. S. military, which reportedly used them in air bombings of
the Japanese capital.
Berg as Quiz Wiz
On October 17, 1938,
demonstrated his knowledge when he appeared on NBC's popular radio quiz show
"Information Please"
5 emceed by Clifton Fadiman, in a repeat
appearance, and batted out correct answers to a wide range of questions that
included derivation of words and names in Greek and Latin, historical events in
Europe and the Far East, current international conferences, and identification
of odd-named figures participating in the latter.
Berg as OSS Operative
After two years as a
Boston Red Sox coach, Berg left baseball in January 1942. It was just
after the entry of the U.S. into World War II and he took a job with the Office
of Inter-American Affairs, traveling extensively through Central and South
America.
He parleyed this post
into becoming an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the CIA, in 1943.
Among his assignments
was one where he was sent to Zurich, Switzerland, to attend a lecture by a
German nuclear scientist and to ascertain how far the German nuclear program had
advanced. If very far, he was to assassinate the scientist-speaker behind
the program. Berg was fluent in German, and after realizing that the
program was not that far advanced, he abandoned the assassination plot.
Postwar Years
From 1947 until 1964,
Moe Berg made his home at his brother's Newark address on Roseville Avenue, and
for the final eight years of his life at the home of his sister at 88 North
Sixth Street. He never held a job, but traveled extensively and always
returned home to Newark to bed down.
6
Ira Berkow, Pulitzer Prize winning
columnist and sports writer for The New York Times, wrote of Berg in early 2004
that in his later years, Berg would frequent Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium to
watch the games from the press box. Recalled Berkow "I often took
the opportunity to sit with him, for it was a delight and an education."
He died in 1972 in
the Clara Mass Hospital in Belleville. His final words, reported by a
Hospital nurse, were "How did the Mets do today?"
Immortalized in Book
Moe Berg has been
immortalized in a national best-selling biography: "The Catcher Was a Spy:
The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg" by Nicholas Davidoff, a writer for Sports
Illustrated and the New York Times Magazine. It was a bestseller in
both the cloth and paper editions. The New York Times review of the Moe
Berg biography called it "relentlessly entertaining."
7
Exhibit in Cooperstown Hall of Fame
A special permanent
display case 8 in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York, contains
photographs, medals, and other memorabilia of Moe Berg's fabled career as
player, scholar, spy, and diplomat. Also included is the distinguished
alumnus silver bowl, given to distinguished Morris "Moe" Berg, Class
of 1918, by Barringer High School.
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