Great Stork Derby

Toronto’s Great Stork derby of the 1920s and 1930s is often reported with a bit of whimsy. But classism, right to privacy, exploitation, the role of women in society, racial superiority, eugenics, and reproductive rights have been left out of the discussion. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy be Wilson. Toronto's Great
Stork Derby of the nies and nineteen thirties is often

(00:22):
reported in this kind of whimsical tone, and I can
understand why that happens. It features a wealthy, eccentric, highly
contested will and so so many babies. Um. You'll often
see headlines that kind of make the joke that this
person that catalyzed at all was the father of more

(00:42):
than thirty six babies, and really because he made so
many people have so many babies. Um. But over the years,
as the story has been told with a wink, all
of the more complicated issues that came into play, including classism,
the right to privacy, exploitation, the role of women in society,

(01:02):
racial superiority in eugenics, as well as reproductive rights, have
kind of been left out of the discussion. So we're
going to tackle some of that today and it is,
as you might expect, not always delightful. And I want
to make sure that we give a heads up that
this episode includes discussion of infant mortality and some fairly
insensitive handling of that subject, both in the press and

(01:24):
in the courts. Yeah, I was well. First, when I
got the email with the episode outline at it, I
was kind of like, why is Holly's doing a baby episode?
This isn't how it normally goes. And then the longer
I read it, the more I was like, this is
this is this is just as grim as Holly tends
to gravitate towards youre this episode is not about Charles

(01:46):
vance Millar. That's the wealthy eccentric that Holly mentioned, but
to give a brief overview of his life will help
us set this situation in motion. He was born in Ontario, Canada,
in eighteen fifty four to a farming family. In eighteen
seventy eight, Milar finished his undergraduate degree at the University
of Toronto and then his next step was law school,

(02:09):
completed in eighteen eighty four, and at that point he
started a practice in Toronto, working in corporate and contract law.
Malar amassed a considerable fortune in his lifetime, although his
law earnings were actually only a small fraction of it.
He made most of his money through smart investments in
real estate. He owned so much stuff, but one of

(02:31):
those investments was a Cobalt, Ontario silver mine, which struck
a very sizeable vein after Millar had purchased into it
in nineteen o five. On October thirty one, ninety six,
Charlie Millar, as he was known to his friends, died
very suddenly. He was in the middle of a meeting
at his office with his lawyer, Charles Kemp, and also

(02:53):
an official of the Canadian Post Office, George Anderson. Millar
was seventy three when this happened, but he had really
seemed to be in great health. He had sprinted up
three flights of stairs to get to this meeting, and
the three men had gathered to settle a disagreement that
they had had over some technicality of the law that
had come up when they were just all having lunch together.

(03:15):
Millar was kind of a jokester, but he was also
really incredibly knowledgeable, and he wanted to prove to his
friends that he was right about the thing they had
been arguing about. So those two men got to the
office after Millar. They had not sprinted up the stairs,
and when they got there, he was already looking up
to information he wanted in a law book, and once

(03:35):
he found it, he pointed to it in the book.
He turned to show his evidence to Anderson and Kemp,
and then had a stroke and died a few days later.
He was buried near the family farm in Elmer, Ontario.
But that was hardly the end of his story, because
his will was just a whole can of worms. The

(03:56):
Millar will was a final practical joke. It opened with quote,
this will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have
no dependence or near relations, and no duty rests upon
me to leave any property at my death. And what
I do leave as proof of my folly in gathering
and retaining more than I required in my lifetime. Charlie Millar,

(04:20):
with no wife or kids to worry about providing for,
decided to just have a little fun with his legacy.
And this entire will was full of odd bequests. Um.
These are easy to find online. Each could be its
own story, So we're just giving these kind of the brief. Uh.
He gave his vacation home in Jamaica to three people
who had to share it. Those three men that he

(04:41):
named hated each other. Um. But it turned out that
Millar had actually sold the property before he even died,
so that clause wasn't even valid. He left stock in
O'Keeffe Brewing Company to a group of ministers who were
opposed to drinking. Similarly, he left Ontario Jockey Club shares
to people who thought betting on horse racing was immoral.

(05:01):
Kind of see how this went. He also made more
standard arrangements. He made a plan for money to go
to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and for the University
of Toronto. But clause nine of his will was a
doozy and it's set in motion an unprecedented series of events.
Here's how this clause read quote nine. All the rest

(05:25):
and residue of my property wheresoever situated, I give devise
and bequeath unto my executors and trustees named below in
trust to convert into money as they deemed 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

(05:48):
for 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 either
registrations under the Vital Statistics Act, if one or more
mothers have equal highest number of registrations under the said Act,

(06:09):
to divide the said moneys and accumulations equally between them.
We don't know why he did this, but all of
this meant that he ended up leaving five hundred thousand
dollars to the Toronto woman who could have the most
babies in a decade, or women, as Tracy just said,
in the case of a time. Millar's will passed through
probate court less than six weeks after his death in

(06:31):
early December, but it did stipulate that that contest started
with his death. So from October thirty one, ninety six,
the day Millar died to October nineteen thirty six, the
Great Baby Derby, or the Great Stork Derby, as this
odd contest came to be known, was in effect. Though
there was speculation about how this whole thing was going

(06:53):
to play out, it wasn't initially a huge story. In
nineteen thirty two, the Ontario government and had an idea
about what should be done with Millar's money, and it
did not involve giving it. Some others Attorney General William
Price introduced a bill in March to eschieve the estate,
meaning that Millar's undistributed assets would be handed over to

(07:16):
the state. The plan was for the money to be
giving to the University of Toronto instead of dispersed through
this contest. This wasn't entirely out of the blue. An
earlier version of Millar's will had left the university the
bulk of his estate. But immediately after this bill became
known to the public, there was a very vocal reaction

(07:38):
against it and it was withdrawn. Prices. Reasoning for introducing
the bill was that quote the will conveyed the estate
on hazardous principle, and because it was not along the
lines of public policy. If this move to give the
money to the University of Toronto had not happened, it's
entirely possible that focus on the Millar will would have

(08:00):
died down and at least until when the contest ended.
But that attempt at a streatment brought the entire matter
into the public sphere, and it brought up questions about
execution of a properly filed will and what powers the
government did and did not have regarding such a document,
and a person's estate, For example, what sort of precedent

(08:21):
would be set if the state could take possession of
Millar's fortune in direct opposition to his wishes. And remember
he was a lawyer. He had filed all of this properly.
There was no question there. There were also objections and
discussions about how unfair it would be to any participants
to stop the contest six years into a ten year timeline.

(08:43):
Some of those objections came from women's groups and some
from individual women actively pursuing the prize. There was another
event that added to the interests of the Baby Derby
and made people follow it more closely, after the kidnapping
and death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. Babies who were
in the spotlight in any way were considered to be

(09:04):
in peril. As we'll talk about shortly. There was a
lot of press coverage of the women involved in this contest,
and there were kidnapping threats made to a number of
Derby families. The daughter of one family was the target
of a failed kidnapping attempt. Some of these threats were
ploys to get families to step out of the competition,
saying that if they didn't withdraw, their children would be

(09:28):
taken or harmed. There was also a variety of threats
of violence made to some of the mothers. From two on,
the baby derby was a frequent news topic. The combination
of mostly low income participants, debates about morality, racism, and
anti immigrant attitudes and just the absurdity of it all,

(09:49):
as well as some feel good articles that focused on
babies and how much people loved them, made this whole
thing for a kind of voyeuristic escape from depression era
realities in North America. In October of nineteen thirty six,
the des Moine Tribune ran a series of articles about
the derby as it reached the end of this decade

(10:10):
long window. One was under the title quote Stork Derby
is headache now. One relays just how disruptive this whole
thing had been for government officials. Writing quote, even the
eccentric attorney could hardly have guessed what a headache his
bequest would give the Ontario government. As the now world
famous Stork Derby moves into the last few weeks of

(10:33):
its already hectic course, one phrase in the will, those
words duly registered is giving the Honorable Harry C. Nixon,
Provincial secretary, plenty of sleepless nights, and as it turned out,
while some women were registering their children as they were born,
some of them seem to have adopted a wait and

(10:53):
see approach and only at the end if they thought
they might be contenders for the prize. Did many of
them suddenly wish to just your multiple children at once,
creating a huge surge of verification paperwork for Ontario's government.
And it was as that rush of paperwork mentioned above
hinted at a mess to sort out. As the ten

(11:14):
year period of time was closing, the legal debates about
Millar's will and the rules of the contest were really
just beginning. We will talk about that after we pause
for a quick sponsor break. Millar's next of kin were

(11:36):
not especially enthused about this whole thing and the thought
that their relatives considerable fortune which they felt entitled to,
was going to be paid out to a stranger. Arabella
West and Alexander Butcher, who were distant relatives of Millar,
made the case that the baby derby claws of the
will should not be held up as legally valid. The

(11:57):
legal tact that they chose to take was that such
a bequest was against public policy. In their minds, you
could not pay for babies, and encouraging women to have
all manner of babies was inciting people who should not
indiscriminately procreate, and this was absolutely racist and anti foreigner
at its route to make more children than anyone wanted.

(12:18):
There was also a concern that was used by people
trying to invalidate the will that had a bit more merit.
It probably wasn't something Millar's distant relatives were actually worried about,
but questions were raised about whether or not it was
a healthy endeavor to have as many babies as possible
in a limited period of time. Yeah. I don't believe

(12:40):
for a minute that they were actually worried about the
physical well being of any of these women, but they
used that as one of their arguments. Additionally, there were
aspects of this whole baby derby that had not been
spelled out in the will, and those were being hotly debated.
This whole business becomes really unsettling and sad. There were

(13:00):
calls for clear guidelines about whether stillborn children counted towards
the number children born out of wedlock. Were also debated
as to whether or not they could be included in
the tally, and if a child was born and then
died in infancy, did it count or not. On top
of that, the rules regarding registration of births needed to

(13:22):
be made clear. Per the will, the babies had to
be registered under the Vital Statistics Act. Children born at
home might not be entered into the record right away.
Whether or not late registrations well after a baby's birth
could count was a matter that had to be decided.
But there were also indications that the women who were
most likely to win the prize, we're all pretty willing

(13:45):
to work something out out of court to split the money.
Several of the front runners had agreed to the idea
even before the competition ended, but that feeling of kind
of solidarity was not shared by all, and legal advisors
were against it. They claimed that the entire will could
once again be litigated if the courts let the competitors

(14:06):
end the derby on their own terms. In a New
York Times article from February seven titled Toronto baby race
upheld on appeal, the Ontario Court of Appeals was reported
as having ruled that the ninth clause in Millar's will
was indeed valid that upholded a previous ruling by the

(14:26):
Supreme Court of Ontario. This article went on to quote
Chief Justice Newton W. Rowell's statement on the decision, reading, quote,
it appears that the question of public policy is one
for the court. Evidence may not be received as to
public policy, although it might be received as to the
facts upon which the question is based. Coming to the

(14:48):
question of validity, the first question is does the word
children in the paragraph of the will include illegitimate children?
The Court is of the opinion that the word did
not include illegit himant children. The word children prima facie
means legitimate children. It was argued that because the gift
was to mother's this rule did not apply. The Court

(15:11):
is of the opinion that it does apply. Chief Justice
Raoul went on to comment on the fact that Perl
Millar's own wording the will was quote uncommon and capricious,
and that the deceased was quote entitled to dispose of
most of his property as he saw fit, provided he
did not violate the law. Justice also pointed out that

(15:32):
the relatives contesting the will were not close to Millar,
it was obvious that he had not intended for them
to have any part of his estate. With the appeals
court upholding the validity of the contest, the next legal
hurdle was, of course, figuring out exactly who the winner was.
That process started in earnest in February eight, well over

(15:54):
a year after the contest decade had ended. There had
been hearings about determining the winner just weeks after Millar's
window expired, and that had involved fifteen claims for various
families and two claims filed by relatives who wanted it
all thrown out. There were other contenders, but they had
like no question marks or issues with their numbers because

(16:14):
all of their paperwork was in order. But all of
this came down to the decision of Justice W. E.
Middleton in nineteen thirty eight. He had been involved since
nineteen thirty six, and then he watched the case and
his rulings escalate up the judicial court system, only to
have it land right back in his lap when it
came time to determine the winner. The women involved in

(16:36):
the competition had all undergone the immense physical labor of
birthing and caring for so many children. This was a
huge burden from a health standpoint. Several of the women
involved had needed blood transfusions and other medical interventions near
the end of the competition. Their bodies were really paying
a price. But by the time they got to the

(16:56):
point where judges were determining who the winner would be,
a lot of them had also just been dragged through
a whole lot of misery in the public sphere. The
second any mother had emerged as a possible participant, she
had become the focus of the press. The women who
were competing ranged from very very poor to kind of
working class, and their entire lives were divulged by journalists

(17:20):
to an eager and extremely judgmental readership. This is just
not surprising to me, based on the same thing happening today.
Over the course of the Derby and intensifying as the
court cases were hashing out, the Danny Mall papers and
government offices were flooded with opinion letters about Millar's contest,

(17:43):
and most of them were very unkind regarding the families involved.
They hinted at how lascivious, immoral, and stupid many members
of the public believed them to be, as well as
how they thought the whole contest was the same one
woman wrote to on Areo Premier Mitchell Hepburn quote, would
you like to tell the women from me that they

(18:05):
are fools and the men that there is no epithet
foul or strong enough to describe them? And I hope
they will have to pace the bedroom floors persistently for
months to come, so that the babies get their own
back for being the victims of avarice. The first newspaper
article about possible contenders didn't actually come out until several

(18:26):
years into the competition. That was on October eighth nine,
and that day The Toronto Star ran a story about
two women, Mrs Grace Bagnetto and Mrs Brown. Grace Bagnetto
had twenty children, ten of whom we're living, five of
whom were born within the millar Will date parameters. At
the time of the article. Mrs Brown had twenty six children,

(18:49):
thirteen of which were surviving at the time of the article,
and six of which she claimed qualified for the competition.
But unlike Mrs Brown, Grace Bagnetto maintained what seemed like
a constant state of pregnancy and delivery, so over time
she remained in the public eye, whereas Brown fell out
of the coverage This story evidence the social unrest and

(19:10):
the outright racism of the time, with a quote from
Mr Brown regarding the competition, quote, if a few more
Canadians would be themselves and produce a decent sized family,
the country would not be overrun by foreigners. Mrs Brown
similarly stated that quote, I can't let any Italian get
away with that leadership stuff. I'm a Canadian and so

(19:33):
is my husband. We're honest to gosh died in the wool.
Native born Canadians of the fifth generation and think six
babies in five years ought to lead. This was the
kind of rhetoric that was reported throughout the remainder of
the contest, both by various people that were quoted from
reporters to just journalists making their own assertions. Foreigners who

(19:55):
had a lot of babies were characterized as irresponsible. White family,
on the other hand, were doing their part to ensure
the strength of Canada's population. This whole problem was no
doubt fomented by the large number of immigrants who had
moved to Canada in the first two decades of the
twentieth century, Because simultaneously, the birth rate had been in

(20:15):
steady decline since the mid nineteenth century, and there was
this whole really irrational fear and panic that the white
middle class was going to be supplanted by a population
of first and second generation Canadians born to immigrant parents.
Grace Bagnado, for example, was born in Canada to Italian
immigrant parents and was married to an Italian immigrant in

(20:38):
an arranged marriage when she was just twelve. By the
time she became known as a Derby contender, she worked
full time as a court interpreter and used her spare
time to help Italian immigrants with legal issues. She was
also still the primary caregiver to all of those children,
cooking all the meals for the whole household. Her ultimate

(20:59):
disqualification was paperwork. She had failed to properly register two
of the children, and she had undergone having to read
other families talk about hers as though they were undermining
society simply by existing. There were so many families who
similarly struggled, many with eight children born during the Derby,

(21:20):
so they looked like they were contenders, and they stayed
in the press, and they had kind of willingly accepted
willingly as in air quotes, there being treated without dignity
in the press. Simply because they saw this derby as
their one chance at a better life. One reporter from
the US Sylvia Grace of the Pictorial Review was an

(21:40):
outlier and covering the story from a much more serious angle,
writing of Millar's prank and impoverished families trying desperately to win.
Quote the joke, if it was a joke, is not
funny to them. Additionally, all the families who seemed like
they might emerge the winner recorded by entertainment as hoping
to make money off of them. The families who were

(22:03):
living in poverty, some of these deals seemed like a
way to improve their lot in life, even if they
didn't win the derby, But of course these offers were
always exploited in nature. It doesn't appear that any of
the mothers actually gained anything from any of their meetings
with agents. There were also some fairly horrifying constant tallies

(22:24):
in the press, noting not just how many children there
were in each family, but also whether any of the
children were sick and whether they're possible deaths might impact
the outcome of the competition, and there were deaths in
some of the families, including one of the families that
ended up being declared a winner. But there was just
no delicacy really to this reporting. While parents were obviously grieving,

(22:48):
readers got what sounded almost like sports statistics reporting, and
they also read personal details about how the child's illness
had been treated by doctors. There were six mothers in
the end who emerged as the final group out of
an initial claimant group of seventeen. The first two were
going to talk about ran into a lot of problems

(23:09):
as they tried to prove their cases, and we will
get into all that after we hear from the sponsors
that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. Mrs Lillian Kenny,
who went by Lily, claimed that she had given birth

(23:30):
to eleven children in the ten year period outline in
the will, and that would have made her the clear winner.
She was often talked about in the paper as like
the front runner and like obviously she's gonna win, but
she had not properly registered two of the children. Mrs
Kenny was also an eccentric who was happy to give
interviews about things like the wooden statues that she carved

(23:53):
of Charles Mallar and models of Toronto, and all of
this made her a popular topic for articles but also
kind of a joke. But the reality of Lily Kenny's
life was not funny at all. Her husband had lost
his factory job at Goodyear Rubber in two and they
had been living off of Lily's meager income, caring for children,

(24:13):
and government assistance. Since then. The Kenny family lived in
deep poverty. One of their children had died from an
infection after being bitten by rats in the child's crib,
and although she had reached out to the Department of
Health to send a doctor, this request was handled with
no urgency. The doctor didn't get there in time to

(24:34):
save the baby. So though the media attention that she
gained from agreeing to appear in lots of articles and
write ups about the Derby over the years might have
made her famous, she and her family still struggled with
meeting their basic needs. In a June six interviews, she
told a reporter that she would not share the prize.

(24:56):
The next sentence pointed out that she and her husband
were on government relief. Another reporter noted that though she
claimed at that point to have plenty of qualifying children,
only four of the children lived at home, the others
having been moved to live with relatives to help shoulder
the cost of their care, and that same reporter, Frank Chamberlain,
also ticked off Mrs Kenny's many artistic pursuits, but then

(25:20):
he closed what had been a fairly complimentary paragraph with quote, meantime,
in the full glare of the noonday sun, she lets
Mary Anne, her youngest living baby, play in a crib
in front of her house. The real issue that emerged
for Mrs Kenney was that three of the nine children
that she claimed tied her for the win had been stillborn.

(25:42):
She and her lawyer believed that these should count. The
lawyer for the estate belief they should not. Additionally, he
pointed out that some of her children had late registrations, saying, quote,
it is not for parties to come forward years after
and claim registration on disputed grounds. After some attempts to
try to reconcile the late registrations, Lily Kenney's lawyers asked

(26:05):
if there could be some kind of settlement for her instead,
and Judge Middleton refused. When her doctor was called in
to talk about the infants that had been born dead
or died very shortly after birth, Mrs Kenny wept throughout
this incredibly detailed questioning that really did not leave much
space for her dignity. Mrs Kenny left the courtroom during

(26:28):
a second round of this brutal medical questioning, telling reporters quote,
they're treating me like a dog. I'm no dog. There dogs.
They can take the money and go to hell. Her
legal team did, however, continue to appeal her case even
after she was disqualified in a judgment that included this
damning sentence quote, the conduct of Mrs Kenny leads me

(26:50):
to be exceedingly suspicious of her actions. Judge Middleton also
included in his ruling on Mrs Kenny's case that stillbirths
should not be count because, in his view, and this
is very hard to read, a child born dead is not,
in truth a child. Another woman, Mrs Clark, had nine children,

(27:10):
but five of them were born after she and her
husband had separated, and while she was still married to him,
she had those children with another man. This was also
called out as in violation of the rules, since the
appeals Court had outlined that only children born in wedlock
would count. She initially hid her identity, giving interviews as

(27:31):
Mrs X in the hopes of obscuring the potential issues
around her children's births. She add even asked reporters to
please keep her name confidential, as she had simply been
too poor to pay the legal fees for her divorce.
Her first husband had walked out on her, and she
and the father of her last five children, Harold Matti,

(27:54):
lived as a married couple even though they weren't legally
recognized as such. Her attorn these attempted to make the
case that since she was still married, her children should
be considered legitimate in the eyes of the court. They
also further suggested that it was possible that her legal spouse, Mr. Clark,
could have possibly been the father, but this only served

(28:16):
to damage her case. As the discussion of which man
may have fathered her children unfolded. It was, of course
a degrading conversation. The judge even joked about her perceived
promiscuity in his remarks, and she was also characterized as
a bad mother. Further complicating her case was the fact
that she had registered some of the children with her

(28:38):
boyfriend's last name, and she told the court this was
because she was afraid of her husband and that he
might try to take the children if she gave them
his last name of Clark. In addition to all of this,
that also came out in court that Harold Mattel, the boyfriend,
had been physically abusive during their relationship, and that relationship

(28:58):
had ended before the court were seatings began. Mrs Clark
had not ever even intended to participate in the derby
until her doctor mentioned it to her in n six
when she gave birth to twins, and by the end
of all this, Judge Middleton had ruled that she had
turned her back on her children and abandoned them with relatives,

(29:18):
and though she had wanted to get them back and
believed the prize money would enable her to do so,
she was disqualified. The four families who won, which were
the tim Lecks, the Nagles, the mcleans and the Smiths,
were all white. Three of them were Protestant, and several
of them had stayed out of the spotlight as other
contestants had been really harangued and just turned into media fodder.

(29:42):
They hadn't made their intent to be counted among the
competitors known until the last month of the contest window.
The tim Lex, Arthur Hollis and Lucy Alice Timleck had
ten children they believed were eligible for the millar Derby.
Lucy was Irish by birth, but had traveled to Canada
to work on a farm when she became an orphan
as a child. There's some question marks about that whole

(30:05):
thing as well. Arthur, who worked for the city Parks
Department as a mechanic, was from Saskatchewan. They submitted their
intent to claim the prize a few months before the
contest ended. Mrs tim Lake had suggested in the summer
of nineteen thirty six that the top seven contenders just
all split the five hundred thousand dollars that had been
set aside for the winner. Kathleen Ellen Nagle and her

(30:27):
husband had twelve surviving children when the contest ended. Nine
of them were eligible. They came from Irish families, but
they'd both been born in Ontario. Mr Nagle worked as
a carpenter, but had only been able to pick up
piecemeal jobs in the last few years of the Derby
and interviews, Kathleen Nagle exhibited a sense of solidarity with

(30:49):
the other mothers in the competition. She said that she
had planned to ensure that her competitors got at least
some of the money if she won. She also intended
to put most of the winnings to her children's education.
Two of the four winning mothers were from lower middle
class families. Both of them had been reluctant to enter
the derby, and they did so only after reporters from

(31:11):
the Toronto Star reached out to them to encourage them
to compete. Annie Catherine Smith and her husband told the
reporter who reached out to them that they had not
been following the Baby derby and they didn't know much
about it, but they had nine children during Millar's ten
year window. The Star reporter had looked it up, and
so they entered on October one, n s which was

(31:34):
just ten days before the derby ended. The Smiths were
in a more stable financial situation than most of the competitors. Mr.
Smith was a firefighter He had fought in World War One.
They were described in the press as quote an affable
and courteous pair who were quote kindly sensible folk. Their
house was in a pleasant neighborhood. It was reported that

(31:57):
they had a garden. The descriptions of them were always
about how good looking and just nice they were. The McLean's,
which were Isabelle Mary McLean and her husband were very
wary of disclosing their identities publicly. A Toronto Star reporter
had convinced them to do an interview in August of
nineteen thirty six, which was two months before the derby ended,

(32:19):
but they had not decided to participate at that point,
and they went by the aliases of Mr and Mrs A.
According to isabel they knew about the baby competition and
they've had nine children, all registered with vital statistics, but
her husband was not convinced that they should do it,
and up to that point they had been hearing about
people with ten and eleven babies, so they really didn't

(32:41):
think that the risk of losing their anonymity was even
worth it since they didn't think they would be in
the running to win. One thing that's very apparent in
that early rite up is that the press really liked
the McLean's. In contrast to the way women like Lily
Kenny had been written about. The McLean Hall home was
described as having quote a pleasant air of moderate prosperity

(33:04):
and thrift. Mr McLean worked for the Highways Department and
an office job, so to the press, this was the
respectable family they had hoped to see when the Derby
Asabelle McLean didn't enter the competition until the day before
it ended on October ninety six. The tim Lecks and
the Nagles became friends over the course of the competition.

(33:26):
They actually celebrated Christmas together in nineteen thirty six, and
this was not the only friendship to develop. Most of
the mothers who were frontrunners in the last year got
to be fairly close because they had all discussed ways
that they might be able to split the fortune and
benefit everyone. One family had even offered to donate blood
when the tim Lecks child was gravely ill. They had

(33:47):
had the child that died during the competition. Each of
the four winning families received a hundred thousand dollars. Most
of the very poorest families who had competed did not
win any money. The press coverage of the winners continued
for several months after the final decisions had been made,
lauded each of them for how well and how sensibly

(34:08):
they had transitioned to financial comfort. A right up about
the winning families in the Toronto Star in May stated quote,
four of the four winners, one is a civil servant,
and one a fireman and an employee of the city
Parks Department, and the last a carpenter, a quiet gentleman
of Roman Catholic faith, who regards every child that comes

(34:30):
to his home as a gift from God, for which
he is most intensely and happily grateful. You'll notice that
these descriptions are all actually about the fathers, when Millar's
will had stipulated that the contest was among mothers, so
calling the fathers the winners just really rankles me. Another
interesting aspect of this post Derby coverage of the winning

(34:51):
families is that while they had not all been on
the same financial footing when they entered the contest, once
they had won, they were all described as if they
had always been kind of lower middle class. In eight
Mrs Clark and Mrs Kenny filed an appeal for their disqualifications.
While they were not deemed contenders for the big prize,

(35:11):
they were each given a payout of twelve thousand, five
hundred dollars and out of court settlement with the winning families.
For all of the families who had tried to get
a piece of Millar's fortune and failed, the gamble left
them in a really precarious position of having huge families
to support. While all of the women interviewed over the
course the competition in the aftermaths said that they loved

(35:34):
children and they had wanted to have all those babies.
It's also pretty likely that a number of them had
more children during Millar stork Derby than they otherwise might have.
One take on this is that women were trying to
achieve a better standard of living for their family through
one of the few ways that they could, child bearing.
In paper by Elizabeth Marjorie Wilton, she points out that

(35:57):
there is a huge unknown element in all of this
regarding family dynamics of any of the participants. We do
not know them. We don't know much about the mindsets
of most of the husbands involved. We don't know whether
the wives were exploited or felt exploited by their spouses,
and whether there had been any discussion among them prior
to attempting to join the competition about the financial ramifications

(36:19):
if they lost. Mrs Kenny continued to have problems and
to be a subject of public scrutiny after she had
three home fires in a short period of time. In
each instance, the home was destroyed and she and her
family had to move. This gave rise to questions about
whether she had somehow been involved in the fires. She

(36:41):
was never found to be responsible, and eventually, she liked
the rest of the Derby mothers, were pretty much forgotten
by the press as different and new stories took over
the focus. Yes, she really got her ringed for several years.
It's worth noting that this entire thing obviously completely changed
the lives of these people, but it also changed the
public image of Charlie Millar. Prior to his death, he

(37:04):
had long been known as a wealthy and extremely successful lawyer,
and his friends may have known him as a prankster.
Most of them would describe him that way, but most
people did not. But the Will and the Baby Derby
had an almost instant effect, As described by writer Eric
Hutton in a June article in McLean's magazine, Quote Overnight,

(37:25):
Charles vance Millar underwent a posthumous change from a rich,
respectable stuffed shirt into a fabulous character who was to
receive more conversational and news page space in Toronto than
any other subject between World Wars one and two, and
that included Lindbergh's Transatlantic flight and the stock market crash.

(37:48):
There's so much to unpack in this thing. I have
many thoughts. Yeah, many of them are crabby. I have
crabbing us of out malar. We can maybe talk about
that on Friday. I have crabbiness about all of it. Um. Yes,
we will talk about so much of this on Friday.
And I want to mention at least one of the

(38:10):
participants that we didn't really get to focus on in
this one because it was a little long and we
had to cut some stuff. But um, I will do
a much more delightful listener mail since this was a
little bit rough. Okay, this is from our listener Jane,
who writes it's about noodles. Years ago, I was very
fortunate that my grandparents took me to Italy in Rome.

(38:32):
Every day, on my way to the hotel lobby, I
would peruse the menu on the elevator wall, planning my
evening meal because that's what you do and not sight seeing.
There was a dish noodles with cream, which didn't sound
very appealing, but every day it would catch my eye.
There was also a German language menu, and I saw
it there noodon krem, which I figured was noodles with cream,

(38:54):
but I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out
what this dish was. On a particular day, I happened
to be on the other side the elevator and looked
at the menu, and lo and behold, this menu was
in Italian, so I quickly looked for the possible translation
of noodles with cream, and all of a sudden, the
penny dropped Fetichini alfredo. My heart soared, my mouth salivated.

(39:14):
Needless to say, I had my noodles with cream that
night and every night after that until we left Rome.
I enjoy your podcast very much. Keep up the good work.
Thank you so much, Jane. You are a woman after
my own heart. If you would like to write to
us about delicious things you have eaten, they provide great
ends to episodes that are downers. You can do that

(39:35):
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
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(39:57):
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