St. Paul Prowler

Paul Presbrey, a small, hard-eyed police reporter who covers St. Paul for the Cowles-owned Minneapolis Star and Tribune, is too nervous to sleep more than four or five hours a night; frequently he climbs out of bed at 3 or 4 a.m. to prowl St. Paul in search of news. With his luck, aggressiveness and insatiable curiosity, Presbrey regularly beats the ears off his rivals on fast-breaking stories.

Last week 39-year-old Reporter Presbrey was good for two breaks in a row. With his wife, he was having a midnight snack at a restaurant south of the Twin Cities when three gunmen walked in and robbed the cash register of $1,700. Reporter Presbrey ran for the phone as the last bandit went out the door. He had the city desk on the wire in time to catch the final edition.

Thirty-six hours later, Presbrey was passing Minneapolis' Sheridan Hotel when a 90-mile-an-hour gale knocked a 65-ft. chimney onto the hotel, injuring four people. Grabbing the Speed Graphic he always carries in his car ("Photographers are never around when you need them"), Reporter Presbrey was shooting pictures when the ambulances arrived.

Later, in a hospital, 20-year-old Gayle Keen angrily told another reporter: "I was lying there in the wreckage when I saw a man approaching, and I thought: 'Thank God, here is help at last.' Instead, he just leveled a camera at me, and bang! then he was gone." Presbrey's exclusive picture (see cut) made the front page of the Star and went all over the country by wirephoto. Hard-boiled Reporter Presbrey sent the girl a print of the picture and a message: "I'm sorry, but deadlines are deadlines."

Just Riding By. However other newsmen may question Paul Presbrey's news-at-any-price philosophy, they agree that he has been uniquely consistent in following it. In 1936, when Presbrey was a 26-year-old cub on the old St. Paul Daily

News, the county sheriff found the body of a murdered woman in a snowdrift outside the city. Presbrey recognized her as Elsie Lanage, a friend of his own father-in-law. Presbrey took his suspicions first to his city editor, then to the sheriff. The Daily News got the inside story, and Pres-brey's father-in-law got a life term at Minnesota's Stillwater prison for murder.

Three times in the past five years, Presbrey has "just been riding by" in a streetcar when million-dollar fires broke out in the sprawling industrial area known as the Midway, between Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 1945, while watching a St. Paul movie one evening, Presbrey stirred nervously in his seat, decided that he had better go out in the street and have a look around. He walked right into a $500,000 department-store fire.

A Quiet Beer. As a lone wolf who sometimes puts in 20 hours a day on his job, Presbrey has few friends among his more relaxed colleagues. Their grudging admiration is mixed with wonder at the chances he takes. In 1934, prowling in St. Paul, he stepped right into a gun fight between policemen and two robbers who were holding up a milk company. A policeman's bullet went through the shoulder padding of Presbrey's coat, wounded a robber.

A year later, Presbrey had to dodge gunfire again to get another beat. He was on his way for a quiet beer just as the cops flushed Dillinger Henchman Homer van Meter, then Public Enemy No. 1, from an apartment hiding place. In trying to escape, Van Meter ran in front of Presbrey's car. Presbrey jammed on the brake and the cops poured 40 slugs into Van Meter. Now, after such narrow escapes, Paul Presbrey is getting a little mystical about his luck. Says he: "Sometimes it scares me. But I couldn't stop going if I wanted to."

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