The fiction in This Week was sentimental and nostalgic, much like the short stories found in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. This week the longest of them told of a newspaperman who struck up an acquaintanceship with a young widow through her daughter on the bus they all rode through the city every weekday morning. He helps her escape the city to a small town, kindling a romance in the process.
In “Innocent Abroad” a wise woman helps her husband achieve his dream. The husband had hoped that some day his boss would choose him to make the annual round of the company’s sales agents. He was now 62 and this was unlikely to ever happen. Determined to break him out of his funk, Ma secretly dips into the family nest egg and visits the boss, promising to foot the bill if he would send Pa on the trip this year. Of course, Pa is a big success with the customers. Pa, who heads up the company’s shipping department, is described in the story as a man who rides the bus with his lunch in a paper bag, sometimes wears a soiled collar when he forgets to change it, and listens to the radio commentators H.V.Kaltenborn and the right winger Fulton Lewis, sometimes agreeing with them and sometimes not.
“One Horse Power” is a nostalgic short story set in a small town sometime in the not too distant past. A vegetable peddler is caught in a feud with the imperious wife of the local banker. The local banker’s wife objects to the peddler parking his horse and vegetable wagon in front of her house and unsuccessfully tries to get her husband to foreclose on him. But the peddler is the one man in town who owes the bank no money. The peddler retaliates by dressing his horse each week in a hat parodying the extravagant chapeau that the banker’s wife wears to church each Sunday.
The magazine also included a poem “Dawn Patrol,” about the early morning garbage pickup, by Berton Braley, a popular and prolific poet of the time whose verse also appeared in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Evening Post.