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Tim Falconer spent three summers on mineral exploration crews, worked in two mines and studied mining engineering at McGill University for two years before switching into English Literature. He is the author of five previous non-fiction books and a veteran magazine writer. His last two books—Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music and Klondikers: Dawson City’s Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey—made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100. He lives with his wife in Toronto.
Viola MacMillan, who was one of the most facinating women in Canadian business history, was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals. MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines and head a major industry association – all at a time when career women were a rarity. Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed share prices to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed. Windfall is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of the trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.
EXCERPT: PINK PENTHOUSE
Viola MacMillan hadn’t intended to rent a downtown apartment, let alone a penthouse. But in 1954, she realized she needed more room because she and her staff could barely move in her Yonge Street office. She found what she was looking for in the Knight Building, a fancy new brick-and-aluminum tower at 25 Adelaide Street West, which offered her more room and a prestigious new address. After she leased suitable office space, she discovered that there was a penthouse apartment on the thirteenth floor with a fifteen-metre wall of glass that offered a view of Lake Ontario.
At first, she laughed when the building’s owners suggested she rent it. “Why, my home is only ten minutes away from here by cab,” she said, perhaps indulging in a little exaggeration. But she soon came to see the wisdom of the idea: a handy place to stay when she worked late and a distinctive venue for entertaining clients.
MacMillan had fun decorating the penthouse, but most of the mining men who visited must have been shocked. The apartment had a terrace and the standard comforts of the middle-class home—including a small piano and a hi-fi phonograph—and the gadget everyone wanted, a television set. But it also had two mirrored walls, a mirrored column and pink broadloom.
Actually, aside from a little beige, just about everything in the place, including the ice bucket and paper napkins, was pink. Perhaps MacMillan just liked the colour; she did like feminine things. Or maybe she wanted to make a point. She was, after all, a success not just in the man’s world of 1950s Canada but in mining. And she was the president of a respected organization that was practically a fraternity, given how few women were part of it.
Being able to indulge her more feminine tastes didn’t mean she was ready to stop spending time in the bush. Despite her money and success, despite her responsibilities with her companies and the PDA, despite having reached her fifties, she kept bedrolls, tents and other gear at the ready for whenever she had the urge. “I’m not going to spend all my time in the office,” she told a reporter in 1955. “You can bet on that. I’ll be out in the field whenever I get a chance.”
When she was in Toronto, MacMillan usually made it to her office by seven or seven thirty in the morning. Once there, she was a non-stop whirlwind of restless energy. One journalist who interviewed her was impressed by how she could juggle so many things: “As she talks she answers the telephone, pours coffee, signs cheques, issues vouchers for thousands of dollars’ worth of mining equipment, and never for a moment loses the thread of the conversation.”
She usually left the office at five o’clock, but that was rarely the end of her workday. She’d often take the elevator up to the penthouse, where she’d meet with people from the mining or financial industries. Depending on how late things went, she sometimes just crashed in the apartment. If she went home, all the extra rooms in the big house on Oriole Parkway—sometimes referred to as a mansion in the press—came in handy when she hosted senior personnel from her properties or other out-of-town mining men, which meant the shoptalk might continue until after midnight.
The house was a great place for entertaining, and the MacMillans took full advantage of it by throwing many lavish parties. The guest lists were typically full of business associates, as work was never far from Viola’s mind. Even though she stayed in the penthouse more than she’d originally expected, it lacked personal touches. There was only one painting, which she’d selected because of the colours, and some plants, but otherwise a distinct lack of clutter. When journalist Christina McCall visited for a 1957 magazine article, she saw only one book: a Department of Mines publication called Out of the Earth.
Explaining that she kept the apartment that way so if she had to leave it behind, she could do so without a second thought, MacMillan insisted, “I’d be every bit as happy in a tent.” The pink penthouse was a long way from the struggling farm where she’d grown up as the thirteenth of fifteen children. It was also a long way from the bush, where she’d so often stayed in a tent when she started out as a prospector, and even from one of her mine sites, where she regularly stayed in bunkhouses with the men who worked for her. Naturally, she wanted a journalist to believe she hadn’t changed a bit. She may have believed it herself.
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While MacMillan had done well since settling in Toronto, a crucial move in her ascent to the penthouse was the 1945 incorporation of ViolaMac Limited. She used it to buy and develop the first mine of her own, and it would become the most successful of all the companies she created or acquired. As was often the case for her, its success started after someone she knew presented her with an opportunity.
One of the benefits of her PDA position was a chance to meet many mining men, even if she sometimes had to win over those who were reluctant to have a woman in their midst. These new connections regularly paid off. So did old ones. Art Cockshutt, whom MacMillan had known since her early days in the bush, approached her in 1947 with an intriguing opportunity.
The prospector had an option on the old Slocan Rambler Mine in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. Although long closed, it had opened in 1895 and was for many years an excellent producer of lead, silver and zinc. Cockshutt asked MacMillan if she’d be interested in buying an interest in the property. She sent Willis Ambrose, another PDA connection, to have a look.
After graduating from Yale with a PhD in geology in 1935, he found work with the Geological Survey of Canada and was one of the speakers at the association’s first strategic metals workshops in 1942. He left the GSC three years later to work as a consultant and to lecture part-time at the University of Toronto and Queen’s University. After checking out the Slocan Rambler, Ambrose returned with a favourable report.
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