Futility Closet - 237-The Baseball Spy

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Moe Berg earned his reputation as the brainiest man in baseball -- he had two Ivy League degrees and studied at the Sorbonne. But when World War II broke out he found an unlikely second career, as a spy trying to prevent the Nazis from getting an atomic bomb. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Berg's enigmatic life and its strange conclusion. We'll also consider the value of stripes and puzzle over a fateful accident. Intro: Johann David Steingruber devised floor plans in the shapes of letters. At least six of Felix Mendelssohn's songs were written by his sister Fanny. Sources for our feature on Moe Berg: Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy, 1994. Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell, Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy, 1996. W. Thomas Smith, Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2003. Glenn P. Hastedt, Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations: An Encyclopedia of American Espionage, 2011. Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Fabled Moe," American Scholar 63:3 (Summer 1994), 433-439. Alan Owen Patterson, "The Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Experience With Baseball in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century," Modern Judaism 28:1 (February 2008), 79-104. "Morris 'Moe' Berg," Atomic Heritage Foundation (accessed Feb. 3, 2019). "'Moe' Berg: Sportsman, Scholar, Spy," Central Intelligence Agency, Jan. 17, 2013. Richard Sandomir, "Baseball Hall of Fame to Celebrate a Catcher (and a Spy)," New York Times, July 30, 2018. Bruce Fretts, "Who Was Moe Berg? A Spy, a Big-League Catcher and an Enigma," New York Times, June 21, 2018. Josh Pollick, "Moe Berg -- OK Player, Outstanding Individual," Jerusalem Post, Dec. 30, 2004, 11. "To Be a Spook," Justin Ewers, et al., U.S. News & World Report 134:3 (Jan. 27, 2003). Hal Bock, "A Catcher and a Spy -- Journeyman Backstop Was an Operative During WWII -- Moe Berg," Associated Press, June 25, 2000. Paul Schwartz, "Classic Look at Moe Berg, Catcher & Spy," New York Post, June 21, 2000, 68. "An Abstruse Topic Saved His Life," New York Times, March 21, 2000. Steve Bailey, "Moe Berg's Legacy," Boston Globe, Oct. 6, 1999, D1. Jonathan Wasserman, "The Enigmatic Life of Moe Berg," Jewish Advocate, Sept. 29, 1994, 1. Louis Jay Herman, "'To Hell With Moe Berg!'," New York Times, Aug. 14, 1994. David A. Hollinger, "How Uncertain Was He?", New York Times, March 14, 1993. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books of the Times: Did a German Scientist Prevent Catastrophe in World War II?," New York Times, March 8, 1993. William J. Broad, "New Book Says U.S. Plotted to Kill Top Nazi Scientist," New York Times, Feb. 28, 1993. Ira Berkow, "Sports of the Times; The Catcher Was Highly Mysterious," New York Times, Dec. 14, 1989. Bernard Kogan, "Baseball Anecdotes," New York Times, June 4, 1989. William Klein, "The Spy Who Came in From the Diamond," New York Times, Dec. 1, 1985. Moe Berg, "Baseball: What It's All About," New York Times, April 13, 1975. Jonathan Schwartz, "Catcher Magna Cum Laude," New York Times, March 30, 1975. Dave Anderson, "Mysterious Moe Is De-Classified," New York Times, Jan. 28, 1975. "Moe Berg, a Catcher in Majors Who Spoke 10 Languages, Dead," New York Times, June 1, 1972. Arthur Daley, "Sports of the Times," New York Times, June 1, 1972. Whitney Martin, "'Mysterious' Berg Well Equipped for Place of Latin Ambassador," Wilmington [N.C.] Morning Star, Jan. 17, 1942, 6. "Moe Berg, Red Sox, Gets Job as Envoy," New York Times, Jan. 15, 1942. Richard McCann, "Baseball's One-Man Brain Trust," [Washington D.C.] Evening Star, May 21, 1939, 11. Tom Doerer, "Nationals Hire Berg as Manush Signs," [Washington D.C.] Evening Star, March 10, 1932, D-1. "Moe Berg Attracts Schalk as Catcher," Norwalk [Conn.] Hour, Dec. 14, 1927, 17. "Veteran Scott Will Start at Short for White Sox," [St. Petersburg, Fla.] Evening Independent, March 24, 1926. "White Sox Get Moe Berg," New York Times, Sept. 16, 1925. Listener mail: Wikipedia, "This Is Your Life (UK TV series)" (accessed Feb. 5, 2019). Wikipedia, "This Is Your Life" (accessed Feb. 9, 2019). "Group Captain Sir Douglas BADER CBE, DSO, DFC, FRAeS, DL," Big Red Book (accessed Feb. 9, 2019). Douglas Bader on This Is Your Life. Dick Cavett, "Can You Stand Some More Stan?" New York Times, Oct. 5, 2012. Wikipedia, "Horse-Flies as Disease Vectors" (accessed Jan. 16, 2019). Gábor Horváth, Ádám Pereszlényi, Susanne Åkesson, and György Kriska, "Striped Bodypainting Protects Against Horseflies," Royal Society Open Science 6:1 (Jan. 2, 2019). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Manon Molliere. Here's a corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from an architectural alphabet to Mendelsohn's sister. This is episode 237. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Moe Berg earned his reputation as the brainiest man in baseball. He had two Ivy League degrees and studied at the Sorbonne. But when World War II broke out, he found an unlikely second career

as a spy trying to prevent the Nazis from getting an atomic bomb. In today's show, we'll follow Berg's enigmatic life and its strange conclusion. We'll also consider the value of stripes and puzzle over a fateful accident. When Moe Berg was born in 1902, he was already big and brainy. He weighed 12 pounds at birth, and at three years old, he was begging his mother to let him start school. His father encouraged the children to study, and Moe did well in school, showing a photographic memory. As a toddler, he loved to play catch, and he became an excellent fielder in baseball, a game he quickly came to love. In high school, he studied Latin and Greek, won a medal in French, and was already making headlines as a baseball

player. When he graduated in 1918, he was voted brightest boy. Brightest boy he certainly was. He might have worn those words on a sandwich board for the rest of his life. After high school, he spent two semesters at NYU, then transferred to Princeton, where he majored in modern languages, studying Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, and graduated magna cum laude 24th in his class. He took copious notes, never carried books, but was always prepared for class. And it didn't seem to tax him much. In his spare time, he became the best baseball player in the school's history, playing shortstop on a team that won 18 consecutive games in his senior year. When there was an opposing player on second base, Berg would call out plays in Latin.

At Princeton, Berg began to show the hallmarks of his later life, a keen intelligence, a love of language and of baseball, and the aloofness of a vampire. He had no close friends, and he revealed almost nothing about himself to anyone. One classmate said he was so devoted to scholarship and his interest in languages that he didn't have time for the life of the campus. At graduation, he had to decide what to do with his talents. Princeton offered him a teaching post, his father wanted him to study law, he wanted to travel and indulge his interest in languages, and both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Robins wanted him to play baseball.

In the end, he signed with the Robins so he could travel in the off-season while deciding on a career. At the end of the baseball season, he went to Paris, where he took 22 classes at the Sorbonne, five in history, eight in linguistics, and five in French literature, as well as the history of Italian and Latin literature, comic drama, and a study of Latin during the Middle Ages. All this education left him almost cartoonishly erudite, especially for a short stop. Of his interest in philology, he once said, my original interest was in discovering where the irregular spellings and endings crept into the various languages. The farther Caesar's Of his interest in philology, he once said, And even this was not enough to keep him busy. He toured Italy and Switzerland, and he read an astonishing quantity of newspapers, a habit he would maintain for the rest of his life.

It might seem odd that a man with such intellectual gifts should choose to spend his life in baseball. Joe Cascarella, a teammate of Berg's on the Boston Red Sox, said, it was very puzzling. Here was this man with a tremendous academic background in a game that didn't call for it. I asked this to myself numerous times. Why would he select the ordinary game of baseball and devote so much time to it? It's especially puzzling because Berg was only a mediocre player. In a pro career of 15 years, he hit six home runs and six triples and stole 11 bases. His lifetime batting average was.243. He genuinely loved the game, but it may also have attracted him because it enabled him to maintain his privacy. The biographer Nicholas Davidoff says that baseball suited Berg because it made him an outsider both on and off the field. To the public, he was an unapproachable ballplayer, and to his teammates, he was an acquaintance who disappeared during the

offseason. Over the next couple of years, Berg bounced through a succession of minor league teams. When the White Sox picked him up in 1926, he informed them that he would be skipping spring training in the first two months of the season in order to complete his first year at Columbia Law School. He said he wanted to have an established profession when he left the game. As it happened, though, in 1929, the team lost all its catchers to injuries, and Berg stepped in and turned out to be a natural in that position. He did pick up his law degree and took a job briefly as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, but in the end he decided to stick with baseball. So in 1931, the catcher for the Cleveland Indians was an attorney with two Ivy League degrees who had studied at the Sorbonne. At the same time, his eccentricities were becoming more pronounced.

He wore the same clothes every day, a dark gray suit, white dress shirt, black tie, black shoes, and sometimes a gray fedora. His teammates once found eight identical suits hanging in his closet. He had invested in a separate suitcase to hold his library of newspapers. He once told a sports writer, if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, you don't need to go to college. And as always, no one knew anything about his private life. After each game, he showered, dressed, and disappeared. In January 1932, he went from the Indians to the Senators, who won 93 games that year. They were the best team Berg had ever played for, but his own contribution was not spectacular. Outfielder Dave Harris said that Berg spoke

seven languages but couldn't hit in any of them. When the season ended, he went on another inscrutable adventure, this time to Japan to teach baseball there. There's a myth that he taught himself Japanese on the way there. He didn't, but he did read a book of grammar, and he read six more during a stay of less than two months. He toured universities and explored the country on his own as much as he could, and told his family, I have never enjoyed a visit or anything more in my life than this one. The Senators went to the World Series in 1933, but they won only one game. Berg stayed on the bench and remained friendly, well-liked, and utterly unknown. He quietly played a string of 117 consecutive errorless games around this time,

setting an American League record, but no one really noticed. When the Senators released him, he rejoined the Cleveland Indians, but kept up the same rootless, enigmatic lifestyle. This might have gone on for some time, but in 1934, he revealed a new and mysterious side of his personality. He'd gone back to Japan, this time with an all-star team that included Babe Ruth. He'd made a deal with a New York newsreel production company to bring along a movie camera, even though relations were rocky between Japan and the U.S., and the Japanese were wary of spies. He took the camera everywhere and shot everything, and they let him do it, partly because he was a celebrity.

That was already out of character. He wasn't normally interested in photography. But on November 29th, while the rest of the Americans were playing a game, he changed from his suit and tie into a kimono and a pair of sandals, brushed back his hair and parted it in the center, and went to St. Luke's Hospital in Tokyo, ostensibly to visit Elsie Lyon, the 22-year-old daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Japan. She just had a baby. He bought a bouquet of flowers, asked in Japanese for directions to Mrs. Lyon's room, and was told to take the elevator to the fifth floor. At the fifth floor, he stepped out of the elevator, dumped the flowers in a trash can, then continued up to the seventh floor, where he got off and climbed a spiral staircase to the bell tower. The hospital was one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, and he could

see for miles. He took out the movie camera and for 23 seconds filmed the shipyards, industrial complexes, and military installations around Tokyo Bay. Then he went back down the staircase and left. He never saw Elsie Lyon and he attended the next baseball game as if nothing had happened. No one knows why he did that. He wasn't apparently asked to do it by someone else. Apparently it was just for fun or excitement or drama. He just did this himself? Well, I guess I have to say no one quite knows, but it doesn't appear so. It gets even stranger. After leaving Japan, he was caught taking photographs in Korea at the Chinese border. The police arrested him, confiscated 25 feet of film, and let him go.

And from there, he took the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Moscow, where he was caught filming Lenin's Tomb. The police there took his film and warned him not to use the camera anymore. In Poland, two more rolls of film were taken from him, but his overcoat had deep pockets, and he still had two reels of film when he returned to New York. Then he switched, indiscutibly, back to baseball, now with the Red Sox, though he still seemed more interested in the lifestyle than the game.

He once said, Isn't this wonderful? Work three hours a day, travel around the country, live in the best hotels, meet the best people, and get paid for it. And he was still famous as the brainiest man in baseball. In 1939, he appeared on the New York quiz show Information Please, where he demonstrated his knowledge of Comets, the Dreyfus Affair, Tsar Nicholas II, Hawaiian cuisine, Warren Harding, and the Sun. NBC received 24,000 letters asking him to come back, so he returned twice the following fall.

Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis said, Berg, in just 30 minutes you did more for baseball than I've done the entire time I've been commissioner. When World War II broke out, he wanted to serve his country, and his adventure with the movie camera may have got him thinking about another way to use his talents. Essentially, he was a well-educated loner who traveled widely, disappeared easily, and drew people out while revealing nothing about himself. He could get by in baseball with those traits, but he would positively shine in espionage. He started by approaching Nelson Rockefeller through a friend and getting hired as a cultural ambassador to Central and South America,

a roving civilian inspector looking for ways to improve the conditions of service members in Latin America. But once he'd established himself, he made his services available to other agencies, and he showed them the films he'd made in Tokyo. There's a persistent rumor that those films were used to plan Jimmy Doolittle's air raid on Japan in 1942. That's not true, but the films did give him entree to Washington, and he moved from Latin America to the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. The Allies were worried that the Germans might develop an atomic bomb. They had the great physicist Werner Heisenberg, they'd conquered Czechoslovakia, the site of

Europe's only uranium mines, and they had Norway and the heavy water plant we discussed in episode 181. By late 1943, the U.S. was working on its own bomb, but the Germans might be making substantial progress of their own. So Berg was assigned to go to Italy and talk to scientists and find out where the German physicists were and what they were doing. On May 4th, he headed for Europe with $2,000 in one pocket and a.45 pistol in the other. It's hard to imagine an undertaking that's less like catching a baseball, but it suited Berg perfectly. He was largely on his own and could travel widely, associating with highly educated people and using his wit and charm to draw them out.

They told him the Germans didn't have an atomic bomb and weren't close to getting one. They wouldn't be able to build a reactor anytime soon, and while Heisenberg was loyal to Germany, he opposed the Nazis. Berg got high praise for all this, and he loved the work. In fact, his reports were so long and detailed that he was reprimanded for them. This led to an assignment that was almost literally a dream come true. In December 1944, the Allies had got word that Heisenberg would be giving a lecture in Zurich. That gave them a rare opportunity to observe him and assess the prospect of a German bomb. Berg's assignment, in the words of one OSS official, was to deny the enemy his brain. He was to travel to Switzerland to observe the lecture, and if he heard indisputable evidence that the Germans were completing a bomb, to shoot

Heisenberg. On December 18th, Berg arrived at a small lecture hall and joined an audience of 20 professors and graduate students. He was carrying a pistol and a cyanide tablet that he could take if he were captured. As if to make Berg's task even more stressful, Heisenberg spoke on S-matrix theory, which Berg wouldn't have understood even in English, and he did it in German, which Berg hadn't studied since Princeton. Happily for everyone, Heisenberg said nothing about a bomb, so the pistol stayed in Berg's pocket. When the lecture was over, another physicist invited Berg to a dinner that Heisenberg would be attending later that week. There he heard Heisenberg say, I am not a Nazi, but a German, and give his opinion that the war was lost for Germany. After the dinner, Berg timed his

departure to match Heisenberg's. They conversed a bit, and then they separated forever. Afterward, he was able to confirm that the Germans had not even come close to having an atomic bomb. When the war ended, Truman terminated the OSS, but Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom. The citation read, In a position of responsibility in the European theater, he exhibited analytical abilities and a keen planning mind. He inspired both respect and constant high level of endeavor on the part of his subordinates, which enabled his section to produce studies and analyses vital to the mounting of American operations. Berg respectfully rejected the medal. The government

had questioned the way he'd managed his finances during the war, and he seems to have been unhappy that the war ended. It had led him to the one job he was perfectly suited for. The last part of Moe Berg's life is the strangest and in many ways the most interesting. Essentially, he lived as a vagabond. Baseball and espionage had both given him the roving, solitary, secretive life he wanted, and when he lost them, he seems to have decided to try to continue that life anyway. The biographer Davidoff wrote in American Scholar, Moe Berg was the least introspective, intelligent man I have ever encountered.

That lack of self-scrutiny was deliberate. Berg never married, never had children or a home of his own, never learned to drive a car, never had a steady job or a half-steady girlfriend for the last 30 years of his life. Rather than make commitments of any sort, he traveled, or, perhaps more precisely, he fled. He roamed the country living on wit and charm and charity. He'd arrive at friends' houses with only a razor and a toothbrush, wring out his wash-and-wear suit in the sink each night, and disappear after a few days. He made friends with train conductors so he could ride without

a ticket. Where before he'd been a spy and pretended not to be, now he wasn't a spy and pretended to be one. When people asked what he was doing at the moment, he held a finger to his lips. He left behind hundreds of baffling anecdotes. One night in the late 1940s, he was staying with relatives outside Cleveland when he asked to be driven to the airport. When the car reached an access road, he asked to get out. On one side of the road was a chain-link fence and the end of a runway. In every other direction were snowy fields. Berg got out and asked them to drive away without looking back. They looked back, and he was gone. A couple of times in the 1950s and 60s, he proposed going back to Europe for the CIA to check on his old contacts, but he wouldn't give full accounts of his activities there,

and he racked up big debts. So eventually, his security clearance was terminated, and he fell out of touch with the intelligence community. When he wasn't traveling, Berg lived with his brother in Newark from 1947 to 1964. When his brother threw him out, he moved half a dozen blocks to his sister's for the last few years of his life. The brother and sister hated each other and didn't speak for 30 years. That led to some confusion when Berg finally died, quietly, on May 29, 1972. He asked a nurse, how are the meds doing today, and then passed away before she could answer. Berg's sister buried his ashes in a cemetery outside Newark, but at the end of her life she revealed that she dug up the urn shortly

afterward and taken it to Israel to be buried there, and the location was now forgotten. So, fittingly, no one knows where Moe Berg is. As all of this recedes into history, he's likely to seem more mysterious rather than less. Today he's remembered as the brainiest guy in baseball, but no one really knows what drove him, and that's probably how he wanted it. One writer noted, whether he lived a glamorous life or a tragic one is a matter of opinion. We frequently thank our patrons on the show because we are always extremely grateful to all of them. But this week we are floored to have three new super patrons to thank. So here's a special Futility Closet shout out to Danielle Hibiya, Magna Andersson, and Suzanne Lightman.

It's supporters like Danielle, Magna, and Suzanne who are the reason that our show is still going today. Thank you to everyone who helps support the show. We just couldn't do this without you. We usually use this segment of the podcast for updates or follow-up sent in by listeners, but occasionally I supply my own update. In episode 6, I discuss the possible purpose of zebra stripes and how the current evidence supports the idea that the stripes seem to discourage horseflies. Horseflies can be more than just a nuisance, as the blood-sucking insects can transmit diseases or weaken or even kill animals through significant blood loss. So something that makes an animal less attractive to these insects would be a significant evolutionary advantage. And while that all makes sense for zebras, I recently came across a study suggesting that striped body painting in humans also seems to

discourage horseflies. The study's authors state that body painting is widespread among indigenous communities in Africa, North America, Australia, and Papua New Guinea, which are all regions in which horseflies are prevalent, and so they tested whether painting light-colored stripes on dark skin would deter the insects. Using plastic human models, they found that a model with unpainted brown skin attracted 10 times more horseflies than did a model with brown skin and white stripes. A model with unpainted beige skin showed intermediate results and attracted about twice as many horseflies as did the striped model. This fits with previous research on other animals, which has found that horseflies

seem to prefer homogeneous, dark-coated mammals, and the darker the animal, the more attractive it is to the insects. However, that attractiveness decreases as an animal's body shows increasing heterogeneity, whether that's stripes or spots, and the more stripes or spots an animal has, the less the horseflies seem to like it. The study's authors emphasize that the primary reasons that people use body paint are social and cultural, and it's unlikely that these traditions began as a way to deter horseflies. But they say that reducing attractiveness to blood-sucking insects turns out to be an advantageous byproduct of the practice. So if you live in an area that has a lot of horseflies, try to look like a zebra. That's very strange. It's interesting they'd even think to look at that.

It has to do with, they think, the visual systems of the flies. We covered this on the podcast way back when, all because of the connection to dazzle camouflage, if you remember. I was just thinking maybe horse flies aren't attracted to dazzle shifts. They're probably not. In episode 232, Greg told us the story of Douglas Botter, the British fighter pilot whose indomitable spirit led him to never become discouraged by having lost both of his legs or any other life circumstance, such as being held a prisoner of war during World War II. Richard Hulse wrote, Hi team from New Zealand. Sometime in the 1970s,

Douglas Botter was honored with a This Is Your Life TV special. If you don't know the format, they talk about people in his life without saying who they are, playing an audio recording of them before they come on stage. One of the things that stood out to me was that even though they gave him a chair to sit on, he insisted on standing for each guest and shaking their hand, even though he was encouraged to stay sitting. There was no stopping him. And Richard sent a link to the YouTube video for this episode, which I recommend to anyone who has an interest in Botter's story. I wasn't familiar with this show, but it seems to have started as an American biographical radio show in 1948 that moved to television in

1952 and was later launched in several other countries. The premise was that the subject of the show would be caught by surprise and then have their life documented on air, partly through photos and recordings, but mostly through the appearance of numerous guests who knew the person at various points in their life. The episode honoring Bodder is from 1982, just months before he died of a heart attack at age 72. Bodder was the president of a fundraising group that was being honored at a cocktail party for having raised 50,000 pounds for disabled children. Just after Botter handed over the check, he was mightily surprised by Eamon Andrews, the host of the British version

of the TV show. As Richard said, throughout the show, Botter does get up every few minutes as they bring in more guests, even though getting up and sitting back down takes some effort for him. He was frequently moving in ways that suggested that his legs were uncomfortable, and he was also coughing frequently during the show. From what I read, he was already having heart problems at the time that the show was recorded. But he really was irrepressible and got up with a smile and a handshake or a hug to greet every guest. He was really impressive. I don't think I'd seen, I did a lot of research for that episode, but I guess I'd never seen him on video before. It was interesting to see. There were several amusing anecdotes told about Bodder during the

show. For example, during the war, he went to the movies in Cambridge with another pilot, both of them in their uniforms. Bodder tripped over a step in the aisle in the dark, and according to the other pilot, he called to the usherette, I've damaged my leg, bring me a damn screwdriver. Apparently the woman was completely confused, but Douglas, in his usual colorful language, insisted on getting a screwdriver, and this poor girl finally got one. Bodder sat in the aisle, pulled up his trouser leg, and used the screwdriver to push back a bit of metal that was stopping the artificial leg from working correctly. He then worked the leg once or twice, stood up, and handed the screwdriver back with a

thanks while the woman stared at him in astonishment. And it was really interesting the assortment of different people who they brought out to be reunited with botter including one of the german luftwaffe commanders who had met botter while he was imprisoned by the germans during the war adolf galland had been quite impressed by botter and allowed him to sit in the cockpit of a messerschmitt 109 though he denied Botter's request to just try taking the 109 for a spin around the airfield. Later, when Galland himself was taken prisoner after Germany surrendered,

Botter showed up to give him a big case of cigarettes to take into the camp with him. And I wasn't sure if these were intended for Galland's personal use or because Botter had apparently used cigarettes to help bribe people to help him out while he was being held prisoner. That would make sense.

I remember that section of the book. They were apparently as a brotherhood among pilots that transcends even nationality. That's nice to see. Yeah. And the show also brought on men who served under Botter during the war, who recounted with fondness how his cheerful defiance made him such an inspiring leader, as well as men who were prisoners of war with him, some of whom participated in several of his various attempts to escape. They recount how he put soil in his hollow legs to try to get rid of it while they were trying

to tunnel out of the prison, or how he secreted corn in his legs that he had persuaded a German farmer to leave out for him so that he could pick it up during his walks, and that was when the prisoners were on starvation rations, or the time that a German sentry that Bader had annoyed slammed the butt of his rifle down on Bader's foot, clearly expecting it to seriously hurt him, and instead Bader just gave a howl of laughter. Bader was clearly touched by many of the tributes and remembrances, particularly by some, such as two French women who had helped him try to escape and for which they were sent to a concentration camp. According to the Wikipedia pages on This Is Your Life, surprising the subject of the show was considered to be a really important element. Apparently, at least on the British version, if a guest learned about the plan beforehand, the episode would be canceled.

According to the Wikipedia page on The American Show, some celebrities objected to the surprise. For example, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy only made one American television appearance in their whole career, and that was on This Is Your Life in 1954. Wikipedia claims that Laurel was very angry at being tricked into this unplanned television appearance and supposedly said, we never dreamed that we would make our television debut on an unrehearsed network program. I was damned if I was going to put on a free show for them. Now that quote didn't have a citation and I wasn't able to verify it, but if anyone else can, I'd really like to hear it. I did find a column by Dick Cavett on the New York Times' site where Cavett reports that he was told by Laurel about

how he and Hardy were unpleasantly surprised by the show's crew and pressed into being on the show. Laurel reported that Hardy was livid and at first wouldn't consent to doing it, but eventually reluctantly agreed. I watched the video of the episode, and I can say that Hardy does seem very reluctant to go along with it when they are first surprised in a hotel room. Laurel gets up to go to the nearby studio as requested, but Hardy is much more resistant and stays seated. There was some unanticipated delay in their arriving at the studio for the live taping, as the show's creator and host, Ralph Edwards, is stuck ad-libbing and stalling for some time until they do finally arrive.

During the show, Laurel seems really reluctant to say much about himself and will barely answer Edwards' questions, though he does graciously greet every guest that comes on with a big smile. It does seem like the show would be almost as good if they just prepared it in advance. I mean, you could bring out the guests without telling them who they'd be meeting. That's true, too. But at least they wouldn't be blindsided. Yeah, because I personally would not enjoy that, being surprised like that when you totally weren't expecting it. Even celebrities have personal lives, and if you just catch them off guard one day, you don't know.

Or they might not want to do it, for whatever reason. According to Wikipedia, Ralph Edwards supposedly threatened to fire every member of his staff if they ever made him the subject of an episode, which seems a bit hypocritical to me. And when the British version of the show was launched in 1955, Edwards was the host of its first episode, and the first victim was Amon Andrews, who then became the host for the subsequent episodes. And that does seem a little bit fairer, at least. Yeah, that makes sense. In episode 232, the puzzle, spoiler alert, was from Jeff King and involved a complicated

suitcase exchange with his boyfriend, Eric. Maggie and Frank Fayock wrote, Hello, Sharon and Greg and Sasha. My husband Frank and I were on our honeymoon to Australia and New Zealand for the past three weeks. While we were driving to Hobbiton in Mata Mata, New Zealand, we decided to listen to the most recent episode of Futility Closet, episode 232. We were amused to hear the lateral thinking puzzle was from Jeff King, as that is the name of one of my best friends, but I also know that this is a somewhat common name. However, once the puzzle came to mention his boyfriend Eric, we realized, holy cow, this is about our Jeff. When we had access to Wi-Fi, I immediately contacted Jeff, who gave us the extra tidbit that the great suitcase switch

happened during our wedding weekend in October. So thank you for a surprise honeymoon gift and know that last week two people were in a rental car in rural New Zealand, having the time of their lives, listening to you all. So given the almost 8 billion people in the world who have never heard of utility closet, it's always amusing to hear the coincidences of two of our listeners or readers who turn out to unexpectedly

know each other. And of course, our best wishes to Maggie and Frank on their new marriage. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We always appreciate feedback and updates. So if you have any to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if anyone has ever mispronounced your name, please provide me some tips so that I can try to avoid doing so myself. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange sounding situation

and we're going to see if I can figure out what's going on asking yes or no questions. This is from listener manon monier a woman witnessed a man die in a traffic accident then she sued his estate alleging that his negligence had endangered her why okay so we're going to rule out that this is like an act of fiction or anything like this is an actual event that really occurred yeah okay in a traffic accident do you mean involving let's say automobiles yes can they are they automobiles i mean he's hesitated maybe they're not automobiles one of these i'll help this one is an automobile he's riding a motorcycle okay so he's riding a motorcycle. Okay. So he's riding a motorcycle. She's in a car. No.

She's not in a car. She's in a different kind of motor vehicle? Yes. Okay. But she's in a motor vehicle, you would say. She's in a tram car. A tram car. Like a trolley or a street car.

Like a trolley or a street car. So she's not... Okay. I tell you that because that means that she's not in immediate physical danger of being hit. I see. I see. Is the location important and relevant in any way? Okay. Is the time period? No.

Okay. All right. She sees a man riding a motorcycle and he dies. Yes. Okay. Is the manner of his death important? Yeah, I'll say yes. Okay.

You said he died because of an accident. Yes. So he died due to an accident, not that he died first and then got in an accident, because we've had some like that. Yeah, no, you're correct. He died in a collision. Okay. He collided with presumably not her tram, something other than the tram she was in. Okay.

So he collided with a car, say? Yes. Okay. Does anything more about that matter? Anything more about that that I need to work out? Not really a lot, no. Okay. But she's claiming that the driver of the motorcycle, the man who died, was negligent.

Yeah. Yes. Well, he was driving negligently. He was driving negligently. But the point of the puzzle is that that doesn't seem to have put her in an immediate physical danger. But she felt that it did somehow. Yes. And it placed her not like a loved one or someone she has a relationship with.

You can't answer that. I can't answer that. She a Siamese twin? No. i don't want to mislead you but i can't i can't say no to that um okay is she claiming that it placed her in physical danger her herself does she have multiple identities or i'm just trying to figure out. As opposed to it placed another individual or being like her pet dog or her sister or her son. I'll say both. Her unborn child. Her unborn child.

Yes. Okay. I thought that was going to take a little longer than it did. Was it the shock of the accident? Yeah. She was afraid it damaged her fetus. That's exactly it. This is from a Scottish legal case called Borhill v. Young. In October 1938, a Mr. Young had been riding a motorcycle negligently along a road when he collided with

a car and died. About 50 feet away, a Mrs. Borhill was leaving a tram. She heard the crash, and as she passed the scene of the accident, she saw the blood that remained after the accident. She was eight months pregnant, and when she gave birth to a stillborn child, she brought a negligence claim against Young's estate. The court ruled against her. It said that Young wasn't negligent because he couldn't reasonably have foreseen that his actions might have harmed Mrs. Borehill. Lord Russell wrote, I am unable to see how he could reasonably anticipate that if he came into collision with a vehicle coming across the tram car into Glen Lockhart Road, the resultant noise would cause physical injury by shock to a person standing behind the tram car. In my opinion, he owed no duty to the appellant and was, therefore, not guilty of any negligence in relation to her. Okay.

Thanks, Manit, for sending that. Thank you. And unfortunately, it was another fatal puzzle, unfortunately. But if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. and get bonus material, such as extra discussions, outtakes, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, our somewhat spoiled podcat, then check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of our website at futilitycloset.com, where you can find that link or a donate button if you prefer. At the website, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000

concise curiosities. Browse the Futility Closet store, check out the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All of our music is written and performed by my very special brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.