Former Dole owner David Murdock dead at 102
David Murdock, the last of the old-school Los Angeles developers who helped transform greater Thousand Oaks into a major corporate center, has died at age 102.
Murdock, a high school dropout from Missouri, built homes in Phoenix and Los Angeles in the boom years of the 1980s. After observing the growing use of leverage in corporate buyouts, he jumped into the takeover game and in 1985 took over Dole Food Co. and its development arm Castle & Cook.
He would later spin off Castle & Cook and its vast real estate holdings, including the island of Lanai in Hawaii, into a separate company. He developed the Dole headquarters campus in Westlake Village and later hired Jack Nicklaus to build the golf course at what would become Sherwood Country Club.
The Dole campus would come to include the Four Seasons Westlake Village and wellness and longevity center that became the focus of his endeavors in later years as he embraced healthy eating and told the New York Times he thought it could live to 125.
After cashing out of Dole and selling Lanai to Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Murdock created the 350-acre, $1.25 billion research center on the site of abandoned textile mills he owned in Kannapolis, N.C. Eight universities now partner at the North Carolina Research Campus to study crops, nutrition and healthy eating. His death on June 9 was confirmed by Dole.
