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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 at 118 Granville Street in Point Douglas, one of Winnipeg’s poorest neighbourhoods, and was a hard worker from the get-go.

“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.’