A wealthy Toronto lawyer left a clause in his will that led to more births than V-Day and the Great Blackout combined.
HE WHO LAUGHS LAST…
The greatest practical joker in the history of Canada was, beyond a doubt, Charles Vance Millar. A wealthy Toronto Lawyer and Financier, Millar was born in the small Ontario town of Aylmar in 1853. He attended the University of Toronto and graduated near the top of his class before attending law school and opening a practice in Toronto in 1881.
Millar was a successful lawyer and an even more successful businessman. Among his early coups was to recognize how important the expansion of British Columbia was to be. In 1897 Millar purchased the B.C. Express Company, which gave him a monopoly on government mail deliveries in the Carriboo region of British Columbia. Through the acquisition of land around Prince George and of boats to carry the mail, Millar became one of the most prominent investors in Western Canada.
Problem was, Millar had no children. A life-long bachelor, he had never procreated, and this left him with a dilemma: to whom to leave his vast fortune? Fortunately for Millar, he never took life too seriously and also had a bit of a cynical streak. Millar believed that everybody had his price, and he reveled in corrupting the seemingly incorruptible. Among his favorite jokes was to leave money in the street and watch the furtive way that people would pick it up and scurry away.
THE WILL
Millar left his greatest practical jokes for his will. With no heirs he was able to use his estate for his own amusement. He is one of the few men who was ever able to enjoy his own death—which he managed by enjoying it ahead of time.
This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependents or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death and what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.
Boomer the Lightning Bolt is the mascot at Algoma University in Ontario.
Being a lawyer, and a good one, he wrote an iron-clad document that would be able to withstand what he must have known would be a series of vigorous legal challenges. One of the meanest clauses in Millar’s will was the disposition of his vacation house in Jamaica. Millar left use of the house, jointly, to three rival lawyers who were known to hate one another. At the death of the last of them, the house was to be sold and the proceeds given to the poor of Jamaica, so even if they killed each other (likely a possibility Millar pondered) they would get no money out of it. Luckily for all involved, Millar sold the house before he died.
Millar left a sum of money to a priest he knew, but only for the purpose of saying masses and burning candles for the “soul of a certain prominent citizen,” described in the will as someone “who will need [the prayers], wherever he is...” Millar never named the person specifically. Since he was a trickster who liked to stick it to those he considered powerful and greedy, we assume this left a small circle of prominent men in Toronto each wondering if he meant him.
THE JOKER
Millar bequeathed about $700,000 worth of stock in the Catholic owned O’Keefe Brewing Company to be divided among every practicing Protestant minister and Orange Lodge in Toronto. The strident prohibitionists and anti-Catholics were now faced with a huge problem. Do they profit from the sale of booze? Do they take money from the hated Catholics? Or do they stand on principle and turn the money down? In the end it turned out that Millar didn’t actually own any O’Keefe stock, rendering the whole thing moot.
To every minister in three surrounding towns, Millar bequeathed one share each of something he actually did own, stock in the Kenilworth Jockey Club. After weeks of very public agonizing over whether or not they should accept the wages of sin, the ministers learned that each share was only worth about half a cent, and all their angst had been over something almost worthless.
Something Millar actually owned, $25,000 worth of stock in the Ontario Jockey Club, was left to three very vocal opponents of horse racing: W. E. Raney, onetime attorney general of Ontario; Newton Wesley Rowell, a member of the board of governors of the University of Toronto; and Ben Spence, head of the Prohibition Union. The will stipulated that, in order to receive the shares, the three men had to keep the stock and collect the dividends for a number of years. Once again, Millar was setting up a moral quandary for a group of proud moralists.
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But those clauses were just the warm-up. It was the ninth clause of his will that made Charles Vance Millar one of the most famous Canadians of all time:
9. All the rest and residue of my property wheresoever situate, I give, devise and bequeath unto my Executors and Trustees named below in Trust to convert into money as they deem advisable and invest all the money until the expiration of nine years from my death and then call in and convert it all into money and at the expiration of ten years from my death to give it and its accumulations to the mother who has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act. If one or more mothers have equal highest number of registrations under the said Act to divide the said moneys and accumulation equally between them.
In other words, Millar had created a baby race. The poor woman who bore the most children in ten years got the bulk of Millar’s estate. Rapid Procreation could reap someone a nice healthy sum of money—enough to support all those kids. The press dubbed it “The Great Stork Derby,” and as news spread so did the, uh, competitiveness.
Charles Vance Millar died on Halloween 1926. He was 73 years old and collapsed of a heart attack after running up a flight of stairs. Millar was a fan of long-shot, pie-in-the-sky stock investments, and at the time of his death he held 100,000 shares of stock in a cockamamie project to drill a tunnel beneath the Detroit River linking Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario. The current tunnel, which on the Detroit side starts right below General Motors headquarters and, on the Windsor side opens up beneath a casino, is one of the most heavily travelled border crossings in the world. At the time of Millar’s death the tunnel stock was valued at a paltry $2, but by the time the Stork Derby was over it had a value of right around $600,000 (that’s a little over $10 million in today’s money).
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As the Great Depression wore on and up to 30% of the Ontario workforce was unemployed, the baby race became a cause célèbre. Newspapers published regular updates. Time magazine profiled the frontrunners. It was a welcome diversion for a struggling city and, at the same time, gave a lot of Toronto couples a good reason to get close. As the clock ticked down the race was neck and neck. In its September 28, 1936 issue, Time noted that there were five finalists:
Of these, three would be out of the money if anyone bettered their record of ten children in ten years. A fourth, now pregnant, needs twins before Oct. 31 to win. A fifth, with ten offspring sure and possibly two more off the record, is also expecting to deliver again before the deadline.
At the same time the will was facing several challenges in court. It became one of the most important legal precedents in Canadian probate history. The state tried to have it invalidated on public policy grounds, claiming that it would lead to immoral behavior, needlessly increase the population, and prompt people to have children that they couldn’t afford, merely for the purpose of competing in the race. At the same time a distant relative of Millar’s appeared out of the Yukon to argue that the will was so preposterous that it should not be enforced. The cases made it all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, where the final appeals were all denied and the will declared enforceable. The Stork Derby was legitimate. In the end, 30 lawyers, nine judges, 125 hours of hearings, and forests of papers were spent trying to determine the fate of Charles Millar’s joke. In 1938, after all the legal wrangling was over and the estate liquidated, four women were determined to have each borne nine children in the ten years following Millar’s death. The families of the heroic mothers Annie Smith, Kathleen Nagle, Lucy Timleck, and Isabel Maclean each received $125,000. Two other claimants, who were shown to have had children either stillborn or illegitimately, were given $12,500 each as a settlement.
The press hounded the winning families mercilessly over the next few years. The McClean family eventually dropped out of site completely to avoid the publicity. Nonetheless, the money was spent on houses, cars, and on the children’s education. Nobody knows for sure how many children were conceived by parents hoping to win a big cash prize. However, it was noted that more children than usual were given up for adoption in the years surrounding the baby race.
Canadian Alexander Graham Bell thought people should answer the phone with “Ahoy!”