[This guy was an Elon Musk precursor. SB SM]
An Eccentric Tycoon Left a Fortune to the Winner of a Baby-Making Contest. The Great Stork Derby Divided Canadians During the Great Depression
In his will, Charles Vance Millar offered roughly 500,000 Canadian dollars to the mother who “has since my death given birth to the greatest number of children”
Jordan Friedman – History CorrespondentApril 22, 2026
A 1936 photo of the Timleck family, one of four winners of the Great Stork Derby Toronto Star Archives via Getty Images
Before his sudden death on Halloween in 1926, the wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier Charles Vance Millar built a reputation as a bachelor and a prankster. In one of his favorite practical jokes, he would place money on a sidewalk and hide nearby, roaring with laughter at people’s reactions as they contemplated their next move. Undoubtedly eccentric, Millar amassed a fortune by investing in breweries, real estate and infrastructure. He once modernized a stagecoach company in western Canada by replacing horses with automobiles.
Millar never married or had children, and he had no living relatives when he suffered a fatal heart attack at age 72. His death “proved to be the beginning of a posthumous career that eclipsed everything he had accomplished in his lifetime,” attorney and author Mark M. Orkin wrote in a 1981 book. Millar’s last will and testament contained a number of strange provisions, but the most peculiar was the one that launched the so-called Great Stork Derby.
The clause in question established a competition among Toronto mothers that would allocate a portion of Millar’s estate to the participant who gave birth to the most children over the next ten years. The bequest was valued at about 500,000 Canadian dollars—equivalent to nearly 9 million Canadian dollars today. In the case of a tie, those funds would be divided equally among the winners.
By the early 1930s, legal battles over the validity of the will and debates over the types of children included in the count had set off a frenzy of sensational media coverage, with newspapers closely following the leading contenders and building narratives around their personal lives. The derby, often portrayed in the press as a spectacle, ultimately ignited public scrutiny and controversy across Depression-era Canada, where birth control was illegal but large families were a hot-button issue.
“It has a lot to teach us about Toronto and Canada and probably the whole Western world at the time,” says Adam Bunch, author of The Toronto Book of Love, a nonfiction account of romance, marriage and lust in the Canadian city. “It does tie into these big historical forces that are at play—debates around morality and class and race and culture and the future of the city and the country.”
A prankster in life and death
During the Roaring Twenties, Toronto was “an incredibly British and incredibly conservative city,” Bunch says. Canada had become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire nearly six decades earlier but wouldn’t gain full legal independence until 1931. Attitudes about contraceptives were still strongly influenced by British Protestant and Victorian values; birth control wouldn’t be decriminalized in the country until the late 1960s.
Millar died at a time when prevailing attitudes tended to view large families as ignorant or immoral. Immigration to Canada, predominantly from Europe, was steadily rising after a postwar decline. Against this backdrop, the eugenics movement shaped debates about the nation’s changing population. An unethical, thoroughly debunked ideology, eugenics argued that too many children born to the “unfit,” including poor people and certain racial minorities, threatened the biological quality of the human race.
“There was definitely backlash against Catholic immigrants in particular, who were seen as having too many children,” says Mariana Valverde, an emeritus criminologist at the University of Toronto and the author of a journal article about the stork derby. As birth-control advocacy groups started emerging in Canada in the 1920s, “the whole business of having a lot of kids [became] very controversial,” Valverde adds.
Clearly, Step, this was from the ‘You can’t make this stuff up’ department…
If I want additions to the “You can’t make this stuff up” folder, all I have to do is turn on the Evening News.
From Silverbelle Mary Bernadette: “It’s so hard to really know what was in the distorted mind of that lawyer when he decided to leave such a financial piece of his will as “incentive” for those women to have more babies but considering the other distorted “gifts”, he had a sick sense of humour and wanted to stir up shit for a while even posthumously. His intentions regarding those women and their families are questionable but their effects were so minimal if there was an iota of “good” in them.
I ended up researching it more and even watched some YouTube’s and a Canadian made movie by the same name about it from back in the early 2000’s to learn more. It was very well done and expanded on the story more and added more emotional fuel to my fire with the added insight to the media-race for the top story and how the female reporter felt overpowered by her male counterparts at a time of crisis…wow! Here is the link https://vk.com/video-85643038_456241519“