Habitually second-grade winners, Taradale CC struggled to graduate to the top Bay men's club competition because players kept crossing the floor to predominantly Napier Technical Old Boys (NTOB) to fulfil their desire to boost their status.
"I was an all-rounder but I never got up to senior grade until I was 35-years-old," he says after Taradale earned promotion in the summer of 1972-73.
"We just stuck at it together and made the effort. It was all fairly done."
He doesn't think he was good enough to demand higher representative honours but in the centennial year (1977-78), a 38-year-old Atkins captained Taradale to their maiden senior championship title.
Pivotal to becoming a flagship club was the acquisition of the late Murray Chapple, a former New Zealand captain from Manawatu.
Work brought Chapple to the Bay as a member of the education board.
The first round of the one-day Chapple Cup competition, which the Lincoln Doull-coached Bay team are playing in until tomorrow, is in memory of the man a Taradale delegation approached in Palmerston North for guidance and inspiration.
When asked to address a club dinner as chief guest, Murray asked Atkins what he could impress on.
"I told him, 'All I want you to say is that I [Chapple] want to play for Taradale', and he did," Atkins says.
A great thrill for Atkins was playing alongside a 20-year-old Martin Crowe.
"He was very talented and I was in my 40s," he explains, accepting watching the former Black Caps master batsman convinced him it was time for him to dutifully drop to the second grade and eventually to the now defunct President's level.
With a reputation of shooting from the hips, Atkins always championed the feeling of putting right anything perceived to be wrong. Consequently the Taradale club life member (1977-78) takes immense pride in his role as a Napier sub-association committee member who pushed for the amalgamation of Hastings and Napier.
The former HBCA committee member can't recall what tilted in favour of a united body (something the city fathers are debating to this day) but does vividly remember the "very late night meetings".
Says Findlay: "Hastings was seen the stronger of the two [sub associations] but amalgamation was inevitable."
For the past two decades, Atkins has helped hone the cricketing skills of 9-year-old boys at the Taradale Park nets.
Four of his proteges - Stan Mair, Jack Roberts, Callum Hewetson and Graeme Tryon - have made the cut to Central Districts age-group honours.
The Taradale juniors were so successful that at one stage HBCA development officer Dale Smidt invited Atkins and brother Ian to help coach Bay junior reps.
"I'm still helping out but I need a rest," says Atkins whose legs are protesting against endless hours of umpiring at the crease and square leg.
The son of dairy farmers, the late Alfred and Dorothy Atkins, he is one of seven children.
He received cricket training from his elder brother, the late Ian Atkins, David Dine and the late Ken Blundsen as a Greenmeadows and Taradale Primary School pupil.
In 1948, he made the second XI Napier Boys' High School team.
"I use to get up at 6.30 in the morning as a 10-year-old to help deliver milk in billy cans before going to school for five years," he says in the days when cows were milked by hand.
When his brother Gilbert Atkins, 88, bought the farm off his parents Richard Atkins delivered milk for another 16 years.
"We had switched to bottles then," explains Atkins, who after that drove trucks for a living until he retired.
"When I was in the junior reps I used to go away to play in Gisborne but I always came back in time for work."
The five-hour, one-way bus trips meant he left here on Friday and returned just before midnight on Sundays before heading straight to deliver milk from 1am on Monday.
He can't imagine anyone these days emulating that feat to play cricket, let alone any sport.
His hard-nosed attitude to work rubbed off on his sport, not just on the field but also in his administrative role.
"You had 12 bottles in a crate in each hand so you just had to be fit to do that."
Atkins married a local lass, Dorothy, and they had four children - Ian (now living in Taumarunui), Karen (Napier), Robyn (Whakatane) and Brenda (Melbourne).
None of his children gravitated to the gentleman's game, something he, "in a sort of way", regrettably attributes perhaps to dragging them along to the ground every weekend.
His wife's story has a happier ending.
"Before we married I took her to the park where she did the scoring."
While Atkins does not harbour any regrets in cricket, he does however have a couple of reservations.
He doesn't like the advent of coloured clothing in the shorter version of the game that has almost eclipsed an age-old tradition of whites.
"I also don't think twenty20 cricket is good for the youngsters," Atkins says.
