July 26 1924 Janesville Gazette — We, Too, Have a Little List!

July 26 1924 Janesville Gazette — “We, Too, Have a Little List!”

Date: July 26, 1924
Location: Janesville, Rock County, Wisconsin
Motif tags: [Little List] [July 26] [Mikado]
Source: Janesville Weekly Gazette, Vol. 78 No. 58, p. 4 — “A-B-C Classified Ads Section Promotion”
Archival citation: Newspapers.com
CHS Cross-Links: Temporal Echoes: ‘Little List’ and July 26 (1924 → 1970) /  Genealogical Corridors of Power

Motif — “The Little List.”
This advertisement playfully cites Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado—“the Lord High Executioner’s little list of society offenders”—to promote the Gazette’s new A-B-C classified system.
The rhetoric of enumeration and moral inventory anticipates the later communicative device used in the Zodiac’s “Little List” letter of July 26 1970: both transform a theatrical conceit into a public register of judgment.
Within the CHS model, this marks the earliest verified American newspaper instance where “Little List” and “Mikado” appear together as a self-referential media motif.

Space — Rock & Jefferson Counties, Wisconsin.
Janesville lies at the center of a genealogical and social lattice that later connects multiple actors in the project’s Midwest stratum: the Drew and Haynes families (Rock → Jefferson County), the Wescott–Conway line (PH canonical murder bridge with Vallejo–Benicia "corridor of power" with Rock County ancestry), and eventually the Hack–Drew double murder case of August 1980.
The Gazette’s circulation region thus forms a durable node within the broader “Corridor of Power” topography—transposed here from industrial California to media Wisconsin.

Time — July 26 as Recurrent Coordinate.
The publication date (26 July 1924) prefigures the Zodiac’s “Little List” letter of 26 July 1970 exactly 46 years later, preserving both the date and the phrase.
Intermediary events — the Drew–Haynes marriage notice (27 Sep 1957) and the Berryessa attack (27 Sep 1969) — extend this temporal rhythm, suggesting that certain dates function as semantic anchors within the CHS chronology.
July 26 therefore serves as a temporal axis around which media, genealogy, and communication events revolve.

Note

The 1924 Gazette piece demonstrates that the Mikado / Little List motif was not a literary rarity but a living cultural idiom in southern Wisconsin during the interwar period.
When read through the CHS framework, the document occupies a triple coordinate:
(1) Motif – rhetoric of enumeration and moral ledger;
(2) Space – Rock County as ancestral and media epicenter;
(3) Time – the July 26 recurrence that threads across decades of communication acts.

Closing assessment

This unique newspaper clipping stands as a baseline artifact for studying how public media language can migrate from advertising to taunt, from choral humor to criminal performance.

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