Carmel J. Maitland; Investor, Winery Owner

Carmel Jane Maitland, an investor and Ventura property owner who founded the successful Old Creek Ranch and Winery in Oak View, died Monday at her daughter’s North Hollywood home of brain cancer. She was 75.

It took a brain tumor to slow down a woman who had traveled the world, owned several pieces of property in Ventura’s Pierpont Bay and almost single-handedly ran a cattle ranch and winery while simultaneously caring for her husband in his later years.

“She was larger than life,” said daughter Carmel Whitman. “I never really believed she would die.”

She was born Jan. 13, 1921, in Detroit, the second eldest of 11 children. A second-generation Italian American, Maitland was named after her grandmother who delivered her in the piano room of her parents’ home. Because he missed the delivery, the doctor only charged her mother and father $1 for his house call.

“She was known as the dollar baby,” Whitman said. “She blazed her own trail.”

Maitland graduated from high school and married John K. “Mike” Maitland on Feb. 5, 1942, in Texas. A fighter pilot during the war, he named his airplane “Candy’s Boy,” a reference to his wife’s nickname.

The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and settled in Encino. She traveled extensively to such places as Africa and Europe with her husband, who rose to become a vice president at Capitol Records. Ostensibly a homemaker, she began buying stocks.

An astute businesswoman, she began buying property in Ventura’s Pierpont Bay area in the mid-1960s, and the couple built a weekend home there.

Maitland’s husband said he wanted to become a gentleman rancher in retirement, Whitman said. So in 1976, while he was traveling in Europe, Carmel Maitland heard about a ranch in the Ojai Valley on the market at a cocktail party and promptly purchased it.

The long-neglected winery on 850-acres near Oak View became the Oak Creek Ranch and Winery.

Maitland replanted 12 acres of vines over the years. The winery produced its first wine in 1981. Even though production has soared to 2,200 cases annually, the bottling line of wine lovers who gather for a barbecue to fill and cork each bottle remains the same.

“It’s not real work,” Maitland told The Times in 1993. “We have fun doing it. We’re an unruly bunch.”

During the 1980s, Maitland cared for her husband, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1979. He died in 1988.

“She just ran the whole operation all by herself and continued to do that right up until July,” Whitman said.

The winery produces a dozen varieties of wine, including a 1995 Carmelita named for its founder.

Maitland was a major contributor to the New West Symphony because of her husband’s love of music, and the organization commissioned a work in her honor by composer John Biggs. Recently, symphony musicians came to her Ojai ranch and performed the unfinished piece that is scheduled for its premiere performance Jan. 10 in Oxnard.

“We knew she wouldn’t live to hear the debut,” Whitman said.

In addition to her daughter and son-in-law John Whitman of Encino, survivors include son and daughter-in-law Mark and Randie Maitland of Encino, brothers Albert, Ray and Leo Williams Jr. and sisters Leotta Valetti and Joanne McCutcheon, all of Michigan; and four grandchildren.

Funeral services will be held 1 p.m. Thursday at Cal Lutheran University’s chapel with Pastor Gerald Swanson officiating.

“We thought it was ironic that her funeral is on Thursday, so we wouldn’t have to close,” Whitman said, noting the winery is open Fridays through Sundays. “She would not have liked that at all.”

Burial will be at Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Alzheimer’s Assn., the Cal Lutheran University scholarship fund or the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Brain Tumor Center, 9500 Euclid, Cleveland, OH 44195.

Arrangements are under the direction of Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Mortuary, Westlake Village.