There are a lot of characters at the Pacific National Exhibition. You’ve got your carnies, your hucksters, your 4-Hers and you’ve got your SuperDogs.
Then there’s Bill Konyk — but you probably know him as Hunky Bill.
Hunky Bill has been selling pierogis, kielbasa sausage and cabbage rolls — Winnipeg Uke Soul Food, as he used to call it — at the fair since 1967.
This year is his 50th at the PNE and he and his children and grandchildren will have served up tens of thousands of pierogis by the time the fair is through. For this year to be a record-breaker, he’d need to sell about five tonnes of them.
“The PNE has been good for me,” he said in the back of his booth about an hour before the start of opening day, where he he’d been slicing smoked meat. “They’ve kept me young.”
The fair has also made him a lot of money over the years, in a situation that has been “win, win, win, win,” for everyone involved, said the straight-talking Konyk.
The 85-year-old fair fixture is a storyteller. Get him started on a topic and he’s got some great tales.
There’s that time he spotted an 18-year-old Bobby Hull dancing with the gals in a suit “three sizes too small for him”; the time he smooth-talked his way into each game of a Yankees-White Sox baseball series; and there are the horse racing wins, the ticket-scalping and the trouble-making — something that started when he was just a kid.
There’s also the story about how Konyk first came to sell at the fair — but it’s one the staff at the PNE like to tell.
Konyk was working as a radio exec in Vancouver in 1967 when he bet a pal $10 he could sell homemade Ukrainian pierogis at the fair. It took him about an hour-and-a-half to convince gatekeepers at the PNE to give him a booth.
The story’s true, Konyk said, and he’s been at every day of the fair since.
Joining him year after year are two more generations of Konyks, including Mark, one of his sons.
“We’ve all done it,” said Mark, who recalled starting at the fair at age seven. Like his father, he hasn’t missed a year since.
Hunky Bill’s booth has an added feature this year — a photo slideshow playing on a television screen above the kitchen. Among the photos are shots of Konyk’s first couple of booths, family members serving food over the decades, and the original prices: 50 cents for a sandwich, for example.
The 50-year milestone is big for the whole family and they even had special T-shirts made up to mark it.
Konyk said he plans to give away a couple of them — but as a proud Winnipeg native, he’ll only give them to someone from his hometown. To prove that, they’ll have to answer a tough question: On which street was Hunky Bill born?
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Konyk at Hunky Bill’s in 1968.
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Hunky Bill’s in 1970.
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Konyk manning his booth in 1971.
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Konyk in the kitchen in 1972.
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Konyk with his official ‘Hunky Bill’ electric fly swatter, on sale at his booth in 2000.
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Hunky Bill’s Ukrainian combo meal in 2004.
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Konyk shows off the goods in 2007.
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