John V. Newman, 91; Leader in Citrus Industry and Horse Racing

John V. Newman, a longtime Ventura County citrus grower and businessman who was the founding president of the Council of California Growers as well as a longtime chairman of Sunkist Growers Inc., has died. He was 91.

Newman, who also served from 1973 to 1977 as chairman of the board of the Irvine Co., the giant Orange County-based development and investment firm, died of congestive heart failure Aug. 23 at his home in Westlake Village.

“He was a very unique person and a great leader in the citrus industry,” said Jack Dickenson, chairman of the Limoneira Co., a Santa Paula-based farming company, and a longtime friend.

Over the years, Newman served as chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, president of the National Assn. of State Horse Racing Commissioners, director and manager of the Hollywood Park Race Track, a member of the board of directors of Southern California Edison, and vice president and director of the Irvine Foundation.

A member of the Rancheros Vistadores since 1946, Newman served as director of the horsemen’s group in 1957 and as president for two years in the late ‘60s.

Newman was born in Pomona in 1910, a third-generation Californian, and grew up in Tustin. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 1931, he began ranching in the Lemon Heights area of Orange County, where he raised citrus and avocados.

In 1940, he took over management of a new 1,000-acre lemon ranch in Oxnard that was founded and partly owned by his father and C.E. Utt, who had devised a way of removing the alkali from the soil in the previously undeveloped land near Point Mugu.

Newman’s son, Peter, said Utt “dug deep trenches and laid a network of pipeline draining to the sea and built cofferdams around the entire property. He flooded the land for six months and the water then soaked down into the soil and dissolved the alkali and discharged it into the sea. It resulted in sweet soil that was ideal for lemons.”

In the 1970s, CBS/Sony of California, making a foray into California agriculture, purchased the ranch from Utt Development Co.

“Because the Japanese revere old people, they let Dad stay on,” Peter Newman said. In fact, he said, his father’s new boss in Tokyo renamed the ranch the Newman Ranch Co. in his honor.

John Newman, who was 30 when he became manager of the ranch, continued managing it until he was 86 in 1996. That’s when CBS/Sony sold the ranch and Newman lost his job.

“He had a whole lot of other things outside that, but that ranch was his life,” said Peter Newman. “He would have managed it if he could have until the day he died.”

Beginning in 1951, John Newman and his wife of 68 years, Ruth, lived on a 360-acre ranch near Ojai, where they grew lemons and raised cattle and Morgan horses. They sold the ranch in 1988 and moved to Westlake Village.

Newman is survived by his wife, sons Peter of Westlake Village and Michael of Pozo, Calif., and two grandsons.

Services and burial were at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana.

Memorial donations may be made to the Ruth T. and John V. Newman Endowment Fund at the Ventura County Community Foundation to benefit Interface Children and Family Services. The foundation is at 1317 Del Norte Road, Suite 150, Camarillo, CA 93010.