As one of five siblings, space was tight in their home. I remember that Neil and his younger brother shared a bunk - Steven was tragically killed by a drunk driver a few years back.
Neil attended Mayfair School (where I got to know him), Hastings Intermediate and Karamu High School. Always impressing as intelligent, he was also a talented sportsman - athletics, gymnastics, boxing, rugby ...
In his 20s Neil, while working as a food safety auditor in Auckland, spent some time trying to find himself in Eastern philosophy - got married, became a father, then got divorced. He was living on the edge of society - or at least that is how I saw it.
It was at that time that his sister Kaye, a chef, who trained in Europe, returned to New Zealand with an idea to start fancy bread shops. In 1992, with her husband Richard Tollenaar and Neil, she started Pandoro, a specialist bread operation in Auckland - and the rest, as they say, is history.
Are you getting the picture - Collinge Rd high-achievers. Well, younger brother Ross worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy as an art director, and oldest sibling Pam, a kindergarten teacher and former Miss Highland Games, is as nice a person as you would ever meet.
Neil has never forgotten where he came from. When his mother's sight failed, taking her off the bowling green where with my mother she was part of a virtually unbeatable pair around these parts for several years. He was there for her. And by the time of her early 70s when cancer took her she had lived a life far removed from Collinge Rd thanks to the success of her children.
Hawke's Bay has regained a good man, and I am talking now in the business sense. I remember clearly Neil telling me, after a game of touch at Onewa Domain on Auckland's North Shore a decade or more ago, how he lamented the type of businessmen who ran around town leaving debts in their wake, of which there were many in Auckland at the time. "Good business" is what he supported, and by that he meant ethical business. The fact that Etika has the same meaning in Malay as Maori - correctness - is therefore apt.
Slowly but surely he has put together his new company, with his Malaysian and local partners. Slowly but surely the scope of his plant's operation, which deals with a wide variety of milk and other liquid products, increasing their shelf lives through sterilisation and therefore eradicating the need for refrigeration, has been broadened. Costing tens of millions of dollars, the plant delivers what New Zealand economists dream of: added value for dairy and horticultural produce. And jobs have been created - 30 at full production.
Neil told me that this six-year project was the most difficult business venture he had ever undertaken, but one sensed he enjoyed it.
Even so his next big project will not be another plant - a holiday home on a Greek Island.
That's a long way from Collinge Road. Good on ya, mate.
