Margen
31 October 1926. Charles Vance Millar, a Canadian lawyer with a taste for legal practical jokes, dies with no wife and no children. His will starts a race that will end with four mothers tied on nine children.
9 December 1926. The will goes to probate in Toronto and the papers pick it apart. Millar left Ontario Jockey Club shares to three men — two preachers against horse racing and the owner of a rival racetrack — on condition that they register as shareholders, and shares in the O'Keefe brewery to the Protestant ministers of the city and to each of the Orange lodges, a Protestant brotherhood with a temperance tradition. Among the clauses there is one nobody underlines yet: the bulk of the fortune will go to the woman who gives birth to the greatest number of children in Toronto during the ten years after his death.
March 1932. That clause changes everything. The Ontario legislature brings in a bill to seize the estate and hand it to the University of Toronto; the attempt fails, and the name the affair will go down in history by takes hold in the press: the Stork Derby.
31 October 1936. The ten-year period ends. The courts have to decide which births count, which records are valid and whether a clause that turns motherhood into a competition can be enforced.
December 1937. The Supreme Court of Canada upholds the validity of the will and rejects the argument that the clause should be struck down as contrary to public policy. The ruling is published in the following year's law reports as In re Estate of Charles Millar, Deceased, [1938] S.C.R. 1.
1938. Annie Smith, Kathleen Nagle, Lucy Timleck and Isabel MacLean each prove nine children within the period. The four are tied and share the bulk of the estate: the archives usually give a hundred and ten thousand Canadian dollars per family, and the figures published at the time run from one hundred thousand to a hundred and twenty-five thousand.
May 1938. Lillian Kenny and Pauline Mae Clarke, who were claiming for children the main distribution had not counted, are paid 12,500 Canadian dollars each and withdraw their appeals.
1938, final entry. The will, signed in Toronto on 7 June 1921, gave warning in its opening paragraph seventeen years earlier: "This will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependants or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death." Three levels of court and thirty-six children later, nobody could say he had not been clear.