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Omaha resident Doug Good was remembered at his funeral service in Warkworth as a rally car driver, supermarket founder, a real estate agent and a feijoa grower. He was also the donor of two ambulances to the Warkworth station. Mourners heard how he admired the service, but didn’t like to make use of it!
Colleagues, family and friends celebrated his life at the Warkworth Presbyterian Church last month, after he died in hospice care at age 89 years.
Doug’s life began in Saskatchewan, Canada. He had a driver’s licence from the age of 12, something that was allowed because so many men were off fighting in World War II. He also had a job at his father’s gas station after school.
At 18, Doug left home and moved to Vancouver. He bought himself a Harley Davidson with a sidecar and married his high school sweetheart at 21, with whom he would have two children, Ian and Catherine.
He bought his first rally car in the 1930s and came first in the 1962 Vancouver Island precision rally car driving race.
Doug and his wife moved to New Zealand and he was commissioned by Eli Bond, of Bond and Bond, to investigate and set up the SuperValue chain of supermarkets.
In the 1970s, he joined Barfoot and Thompson as a real estate agent and his career flourished.
His colleagues remember a particularly unusual advertisement for a house on a main transit route in Auckland. It read, “Be rocked to sleep to the tune of container trucks”. The house sold two weeks later.
Doug was ultimately made a Fellow of the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand and was the vice-president in 1994.
Doug and Beryl Good married in 1974 and their son Robert was born 18 months later. The couple moved back to Canada, but then saved up to return to New Zealand to start Good Realty in Coatesville.
They bought a property there with hundreds of feijoa and citrus plants, previously owned by Harold Innes of Innes Tartan soft drinks, and soon found themselves in the feijoa export business.
Doug’s colleagues say he had a knack for identifying value ahead of time, selling Coatesville properties that later became trendy among Aucklanders.
The successful real estate business was sold to son Ian and his wife Deborah.
Ian found Doug and Beryl a house in Omaha which would eventually become their permanent home.
Doug was known for walking the beach at Omaha each day and could often be seen carrying a bag with plastic rubbish he had picked up.
He was also known to dislike hospitals and ambulances, which was ironic because he and Beryl donated the ‘Dobegoo’ ambulance to Warkworth in 2017.
One day, Doug slipped and fell, taking a knock to his head, and it was the Dobegoo that turned up to treat him. Determined not to be taken away, Doug was terser than he intended with the drivers, and out of guilt promised to buy them another ambulance if he didn’t have to go to hospital.
The promise was honoured and ‘Dobegoo two’ was delivered last year. Perhaps it was fate when the second ambulance arrived to treat Doug in June. The paramedic asked Doug,
“What’s the worst thing to happen to you today?” “Your breath,” Doug replied.
He was whisked off before a ‘Dobegoo three’ could be negotiated.
