Since Goddard’s day a mainstay of the magazine was short items on strange and unusual stories. Schurmacher wrote that they often were based on a one or two line item that someone would hand a staff writer who would use his imagination to embellish these spare sentences into several paragraphs. Since the events chronicled tended to take place in remote villages somewhere in the Balkans or another inaccessible locale they were all but impossible to authenticate. American Weekly still ran briefs in 1946, although those in the April 14 were less bizarre. “No Bad Babies” was based on Mary Aldrich’s new book “The Problem Is in the Parenting.” “Are Women Wiser?” reported on a talk by University of Pennsylvania professor Kenneth E. Appell that suggested they were in many ways. The supplement also ran brief stories on sharks, a one-armed paperhanger, a pub-crawling Welsh parson and the training of black leopards, dubbed the “wildest of them all.” The reader learned that East Africans were finding new uses for surplus flame throwers and that a New Zealand criminology journal had suggested that a sugar deficiency was behind some crimes. “Bigger Feet for Broader Horizons” claimed that women’s feet were growing larger. “Lassie’s Back Home” was about a little girl who ran away with her dog after her mother insisted that the pooch be destroyed when it became pregnanct for the third time. The girl as well as the dog and its puppies returned home safely to a joyous homecoming.