Personographs.

NZ Truth, Issue 1203, 20 December 1928, Page 6

Personographs.

"Scoop" Sleeman Sets Sail

<4QCOOP" is what folk call, him, both m New Zealand and m Australia; O and, m face of his record, it seems almost absurd that this young Christchurch fellow's years should number no more than twenty-one. "Scoop" wanted — hard — to be a journalist. The lawyer's office where he worked didn't give his imagination sufficient scope. So he hung around accidents and hovered about any place whatsoever where good news — good, that, is, from the harassed editor's point of view — might be expected to eventuate. The results he handed in > to whatever paper would take them — and the consequence was a job on the "Christchurch Star." In three years, young Sleeman had worked his way so high up on the tree that he was chosen to trail a typewriter m the wake of the Duke of York's triumphal train. This alone would be enough to make many a young pen-pusher regard himself as made, for Sleeman was .correspondent, on this occasion, not only for the New Zealand papers, but for the London "Daily Express." '<Scoop," however, yearned for fresh fields, and with £6 m his pocket and £40 m the bank, started for the wilds of Sydney, where, on landing, he found a perch m the "dirty half-mile" of Darlinghurst. . As Thomas Burke delved m the slums of London, looking for the wherewithal to outfit his "Limehouse Nights," Sleeman explored the underworld of Sydney, and wove the results into vivid stuff which the Australian papers were not slow to absorb. A few days m New Zealand provided breathing space, but now Scoop is off to Chicago, bent on finding out whether that city, with its Big- Bill Thompson and its bandits, can really provide more thrills than Sydney.