A Journalist of the Old School

The Birkenhead is a tough bullet to chew." If one had ever read that story about a crusty, straight-talking sea captain somewhere in the annals of time and then met Sabam Siagian for the first time, that sentence would immediately spring to mind.

Sabam fit into that clich of journalists of a certain era: hard-bitten, cynical, brusque to the point of rudeness. A dragon of an editor who constantly had smoke billowing out of his pipe, he could make a junior reporter want to curl up and die with one hard look from him when Sabam noted that the reporter had gotten her lead all wrong.