Moe Berg

"Back in New York, he and [sportswriter] John Kieran rode the train together out from Manhattan to see a Princeton football game. Kieran had with him a fat, dog-eared Latin dictionary, which he and Berg fell upon like starving men. They traced the roots of English words from Latin, through French and Italian, into their modern English forms, and they examined prized quotations from Cicero, Caesar, Horace, and Virgil. As the train arrived in Princeton, Berg pleased Kieran immensely, by saying, 'Imagine wasting time and money in a nightclub when you can have fun like this.'" - from The Catcher Was a Spy, by Nicholas Dawidoff