The Great Stork Derby

J.V. Rahilly was an engineering librarian in Ontario.

Orkin is a lawyer and the author of both scholarly and popular accounts of the English and French languages in Canada. He also writes legal texts, and this current book (despite the humourous and somewhat pathetic nature of its subject matter) can be considered a good model of legal searching and commentary. Charles Vance Millar died in 1926. In his will he left an unusual clause: he directed that the bulk of his estate of $750,000 should be paid to the mother who in the ten-year period following his death had given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children. This story is the substance of Orkin’s book, and while it is a good account in a lively, readable style (picturing Toronto society of 50 years ago), it is also a good description of the legal ins and outs, the ploys, the publicity, the disputes, and the jockeying about. There are lots of notes and footnotes (mercifully relegated to “endnotes” so that the eye is not distracted), and documentation from the Toronto newspaper accounts of the time, Ontario Supreme Court records, and various law reports. Almost every scrap of information is documented as being recorded somewhere in the piles of paper that resulted from suits and countersuits. There are photographs and front-page reproductions from the Toronto Star. Eventually, the award was split among four women, each of whom had nine children within the ten-year period.