Hunky Bill made his name in ‘Ukrainian soul food’
In 1967 Bill Konyk was working at CFUN selling ads. He was always going on about how great Ukrainian food was in his native Winnipeg, so one day his friends challenged him to get a booth at the PNE and sell it.
So he did.
“His lawyer made him a wager (for $10), saying he couldn’t get into the PNE,” said Bill’s son Mark Konyk. “He said ‘I’ll take that wager.’ He went down to the PNE and harassed and hounded them until he got what he wanted.”
He called his booth the Winnipeg Garlic Sausage Company, and did a gangbuster business selling kielbasa, perogies and holopchi (Ukrainian cabbage rolls).
Rebranding the Winnipeg Garlic Sausage Company Hunky Bill’s House of Perogies, he decided to bring “Ukrainian soul food” to the masses. He became so successful that Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd dubbed him “the perogy poobah.”
Tuesday night, Konyk died from bone cancer at a hospice in Ladner. He was 88.
Billie Martin Konyk was born May 15, 1931, in Winnipeg. He grew up in Point Douglas, one of Winnipeg’s poorest neighbourhoods.
“He was always a salesman, from a very young age,” said Mark Konyk. “He was working selling newspapers, hustling, scalping tickets.”
When he was 16 his father was killed in an industrial accident. There were five kids in the family, and they supported their mother. After Bill became successful, he set up a scholarship fund in his mother’s name for kids of single parents.
In the 1950s he moved to Chicago to sell cash registers, where he met his wife Kay. In 1958 they returned to Winnipeg, where he was sales manager at a local radio station before being lured out west to CFUN in 1966.
After the success of his booth at the PNE, his son said Bill swore “he’d never work for anyone else again.”
The first Hunky Bill’s restaurant opened at 1440 Lonsdale in North Vancouver, and was followed by outlets all over the Lower Mainland. “We were in Park Royal, we were in Lansdowne, Guildford, Robson Square,” said Mark Konyk. “We even had a franchise in Kelowna in the late ’70s.”
Konyk called the restaurant Hunky Bill’s because that was his nickname growing up. Ukrainians were called hunkies in Winnipeg, an abbreviation of the pejorative “bohunk.”
“Hunky was what you called your friends, bohunk was what you called your enemies,” Bill told Boyd in 1980. “I assumed we called ourselves hunkies because I grew up hearing my father say at the dinner table, ‘Gimme hunk meat, gimme hunk bread.’ My father’s only sin was that he did not speak English well. But I never thought less of my father for the way he spoke, and I never thought less of anyone I called a hunky.”
The Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association of Vancouver felt otherwise. In 1980 it launched a complaint under B.C.’s Human Rights Code, saying the use of hunky “was an affront to the dignity of persons of Ukrainian descent.”
The case went all the way to B.C. Supreme Court in 1983, which ruled Konyk’s use of the name Hunky Bill didn’t discriminate against anyone.
Konyk branched out into seafood with a chain called Barnacle Bill’s, and co-owned the Dover Arms pub beside his Denman Street Hunky Bill’s. He sold all the retail outlets in 2000, but continued to make perogies and sell them in stores.
“Right up to about a year ago he was still doing deliveries,” said Mark Konyk. “He had his regular route, he loved being out there talking to people, making sales.”
Konyk had incredible energy. Sometimes you’d see him outside Canucks games, scalping tickets for his friends. He also kept his booth at the PNE, which is now in its 52nd year.
The PNE’s Laura Ballance said he was an innovator to the end.
“I used to bug him that he was a Perogy Renaissance man,” said Ballance. “He was the first guy who ever talked to me about gluten. He said ‘I think this gluten thing’s going to catch on!’”
Konyk is survived by his wife Kay and his sons Bill Jr., Clayton and Mark. A celebration of life will probably be held in October.