Join historian John Cilio at the Ridgefield Library on Tuesday, June 20th and learn about baseball’s quirky catcher and spy, Moe Berg.  Berg was an OSS agent whose secret photographs of Tokyo helped the Doolittle Raiders – and helped evaluate the Nazi atom bomb project.  REGISTER.

No one knew him. He never married and had no close friends. Even his brother and sister found him mysterious. Baseball’s spy gained fame at Princeton as a shortstop on the baseball diamond. That fame provided the opportunity to join the Brooklyn Dodgers, then known as the Robins. During the next nineteen seasons, he played for several major league teams but was often a bench warmer with a .243 batting average.

The mystery intensified when, in 1934, Moe Berg joined the traveling major league All-Star team including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. One of their destinations was Tokyo, Japan. There were other international trips that could leverage his familiarity with 16 languages. He would quietly retire from the U.S. Office of Strategic Service in 1947.

John Cilio is a historical storyteller, author and researcher who has brought historical stories back to life for over 15 years. A member of the Organization of American Historians and the Association for the Study of Connecticut History, he retired from IBM corporate marketing communications. Read more about John Cilio.