Another item of Patterson comic strip lore is that he rejected Dale Messick's strip "Brenda Starr" in 1940 because he "had tried a woman cartoonist once... and wanted no more of them." Patterson's assistant, Mollie Slott -- later the vice president of the syndicate -- saw the discarded samples, and encouraged Messick to change Brenda from a "girl bandit" to a reporter. Patterson grudgingly accepted the strip, but ran it in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday comic book supplement, rather than the daily paper. He refused to run it in the "Daily News", which finally carried "Brenda Starr, Reporter" in 1948, two years after Patterson's death.