It all started on Halloween in 1926. That’s the day Charles Vance Millar died. He was a rich Toronto lawyer and financier — best known for modernizing a stagecoach company out West, replacing horses with automobiles. He amassed quite an impressive fortune during his life, but he never got married or had any kids. So, when he rushed up some stairs that Halloween and it proved to be too much for his seventy-three-year-old heart, there was no one to inherit his fortune. He left no close relatives behind.
What he did leave behind was a bizarre Last Will and Testament. Millar had always loved practical jokes and he found a way to turn his death into the biggest prank of all.
To seven Protestant ministers who supported Prohibition, Millar left shares to the O’Keefe brewery. He also gave some of those stocks to every Orange Lodge in Toronto — leaving the Catholic-hating Orangemen with an investment in the Catholic O’Keefe’s. To a couple of Ontario’s most ardent opponents of horse racing, he left memberships in the Ontario Jockey Club. And to three local lawyers who absolutely despised each other, Millar left joint ownership of a vacation home in Jamaica.
But those bequests were nothing compared to the strangest and most controversial clause: Millar declared that the rest of his fortune would be left to the woman in Toronto who gave birth to the most children over the course of the next ten years.
And so began the Great Stork Derby.
No one seems to be entirely sure what Millar was thinking. Some say his final prank was meant as a satirical comment on the provincial law banning birth control. Or on the absurdity of a judicial system that would uphold such a ridiculous will. Others wondered if he just wanted to show how far people were willing to go for money. One newspaper pointed out that he was “a bachelor almost to the point of being a misogynist”; the result, it seems, of a bitter, broken heart. As a young, struggling lawyer, he’d been rejected by the woman he loved when his modest salary proved too little to impress her rich family.
His will gave little explanation and, at first, people had trouble believing it was even real. When Millar’s old law partner found it, he assumed it was a joke, not a legal document. When it became clear Millar was serious, many people were outraged. Millar’s distant relatives launched legal challenges. TIME Magazine worried the prize might be won by “mental defectives” or by immigrants. The Ontario government called the Stork Derby “a fiasco,” “a racket,” and “the most revolting and disgusting exhibition ever put on in a civilized country.” (This is the same Ontario government that had recently taken the Dionne quintuplets away from their family to be raised as a tourist attraction.) They tried to pass legislation against the contest and failed. Millar had been a good lawyer; the will he wrote was airtight. One legal challenge after another was defeated. Even the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the Stork Derby was valid. As one judge put it, “I cannot find that reproduction of the human race is contrary to morals.”
In fact, the contest was picking up steam. Millar died in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the prosperous days of flappers and jazz. But just a few years later, the stock market crashed. By the time the contest was finally drawing to a close, Toronto was in the grips of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate hit 30 percent. Even those who were lucky enough to still have a job found average wages cut by more than half. A quarter of the city was on government relief. And with poverty everywhere, the prize money meant more than ever.
Meanwhile, the Millar fortune kept growing. While most people’s investments were going up in smoke, his were still paying off long after he died. A two-dollar stake in a proposed tunnel between Detroit and Windsor turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars when the tunnel opened in 1930. By the time the Derby deadline arrived, Millar’s estate was worth nearly a million dollars — more than ten million in today’s money.
Most Torontonians decided the Great Depression wasn’t the right time to build a family. The number of people getting married in the city was cut nearly in half, and the birth rate plummeted, too. All over the world, the fertility rate was dropping faster than at any other time in recorded history. It’s been called “The Baby Bust.”
But now, some Toronto families were racing to have as many babies as they could, making a desperate bid for Millar’s fortune. As the contest drew to a close, the city’s most fertile women came forward to make their claims. That sparked even more controversy and intolerance. Many of the mothers were from poverty-stricken families. Some had risked their lives giving birth to their children. Others had seen them die as infants — and were disqualified because of it. TIME even reported that a Stork Derby baby had been killed by rats. One woman, Grace Bagnato, was disqualified because her husband was an undocumented Italian immigrant. (She was also an important pioneer of Torontonian multiculturalism who could speak seven languages; she has her own historical plaque in Little Italy.) Another mother was disqualified because five of her ten children were conceived out of wedlock — the law discriminated against “illegitimate” children.
In the end, after more than a year spent sorting it all out, the prize money was split evenly between four mothers. Their children were all “legitimate,” properly registered, and still alive. Annie Smith, Alice Timleck, Kathleen Nagle, and Isobel MacLean had all given birth to nine babies in ten years. Each mother was awarded $125,000. Two more settled out of court for smaller amounts. The money was, according to later accounts, invested wisely in businesses, securities, and homes. The mothers and their families retreated from public view. The controversy and excitement faded. Procreation went back to being the dreary, ho-hum task it has always been.
That is, at least, until 1945. Thomas Foster had been mayor of Toronto when the Stork Derby began — and he thought the contest was a wonderful idea. So, when he died at the age of ninety-three, the whole thing started all over again.