the Larry and Willy show
Willy Percy son of Don
Percy
Larry & Willy show
Thunder Bay ON; morning co-host Larry & Willy show CFOX-FM Vancouver 1988-July
2003; British Columbia Association of Broadcasters Broadcaster Performer of the
Year 1996; morning co-host Larry & Willy
show CKLG-FM Vancouver October 2003-current.
***
Larry Hennessey
BORN: Avondale, Nfld.,
May 21, 1960.
CFLW Wabush, Labrador
- Larry & Willy show Thunder Bay ON; morning co-host Larry & Willy show
CFOX-FM Vancouver 1988-July 2003; British Columbia Association of Broadcasters
Broadcaster Performer of the Year 1996; morning co-host Larry & Willy show CKLG-FM Vancouver October
2003-current.
***
October 1/04
As another anniversary
passes, dynamic duo takes a look back
They are, without a
doubt, the hardest-working and most enduring morning team ever to grace the
Vancouver airwaves.
On the occasion of
their 19th anniversary as a morning radio duo, Air Traffic sat down with 96.9
JACK-FM's Larry Hennessey and Willy Percy to talk about where it all began --
and where it might lead.
We know radio is in
Willy's gene-pool with his father being a morning man. Larry, how did you get
started?
Larry: I had a friend
who was in the mentoring program at a local radio station in the mining town of
Wabash, Labrador. I had just finished Grade 10. They needed someone for two
weeks in the summer so I went down and faked an audition. Two weeks led through
the whole summer and, basically, I've been doing it ever since.
You've said before
that your initial days as a morning team weren't great. If you were that bad as
a duo, what were you like individually?
Willy: You realize early
on that some people have it and some people don't. In our case, a guy named Ray
Davies put us together, figuring that we might have something.
What do you think is
the secret of your endurance?
Willy: When I first
went to CKPR in Thunder Bay, Ont., the idea was to team me up with somebody.
Certain people thought I was there to take their jobs, so almost to a man,
everybody treated me with ill will -- except for Larry, who couldn't have cared
less. Within the first few minutes of meeting him, we were joking around. I had
worked the first three days on-air with a guy who certainly didn't enjoy
working with me and was doing everything he could to sabotage what was going
on. The program director called me in and told me that the guy had been fired
and I would now be working with Larry. I can't explain it. We just get along
and we've lasted longer than I've had friends who have gotten together and been
married and divorced. To this day, if we go to a corporate function or a
barbecue or whatever, there could be 3,000 people there, and Larry is the guy
I'll spend most of my time with. It's not like I don't see him enough -- that's
just how we are.
Radio has changed a
lot over the years. How has it changed for better or worse?
Willy: So many
channels are starved for content -- so anything is acceptable. People with
really mediocre talent or no talent get jobs because there is such a void to
fill. Also, multiple licensing ownership, which sounds like a good idea from a
business level, but what that leads to is three big guys who own everything and
they don't care about any of the little monkeys they have at our level.
Larry: One of the huge
benefits for radio in the last while is the success of JACK, which has let
every other station in Vancouver widen their playlists. It's given people a
much better variety of music to listen to.
In all the time you've
put into a working relationship, have your personal relationships ever
suffered?
Willy: I've got a
five-year-old son and a two-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. For a long
time, my responsibility was the show and three or four nights a week, Larry and
I would be out until one or two in the morning and two or three hours later
would be back on the air again. The amount of time we spent then didn't matter to
me because I only had a girlfriend. It's only now that I recognize that Larry
-- who had a home life with a daughter and a son -- had to suffer.
Larry: My guarantee to
my wife was that I was going to be gone a lot, but every free second I have,
I'm going to be here for you guys.
As we look ahead, a
20th anniversary for you guys is obvious. How much more do you see beyond that?
Willy: We don't often
talk about contracts, but one day Larry and I were driving and I was projecting
what happens when this contract ends, and I thought, maybe another five years.
Larry says, "Nine years, six months." I said, "Well, that's
what's left in the contract and that'll take us to 55," and Larry says
again, "Nine years and six months!"
Larry: And that's now
become nine years, one month and six days.
***
October 14/90
When Willy Percy was three years old, he says
he managed to burn down the family home in Peterborough, Ont., playing with
matches.
"My father comes home
and there's big action down his street - fire trucks and police and crowds
standing around," says Willy with a chuckle. "He thinks: 'Holy cow,
what's going on?' And then he realizes his house is missing!"
As the younger Percy
tells it, his dad was standing, hands on hips, staring at the chaos, when his
son came and stood by him, struck the same pose and said: "Hi, dad. Boy,
am I ever tired!"
"He wanted to
strangle me - he knew I did it," laughs Willy, as he tells the story.
These days, Don and
Willy Percy are blazing a different kind of trail in Vancouver.
They're the only
father and son in Canada who work on competing radio stations in the same time
slot.
Don Percy is the
morning man with CISL, the "oldies" station that broadcasts from
studios in Richmond, across the road from Fantasy Gardens.
And a few kilometres
away in downtown Vancouver, Willy Percy is half of the wild and wacky Larry and
Willy Show on CFOX.
Over at CISL, Don
Percy, 53, works the 6-9 a.m. shift with traffic reporter Casey White.
A radio man of the old
school, he has 34 years on air under his belt, working in Southern Ontario,
Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver.
He started out as a
junior radio announcer in the days when that was "the guy who swept the
floors and washed the windows and got one newscast a week at 4:30 p.m. on
Thursdays."
His first day on the
air, his landlady phoned in to say that "I was 'good and clear' and I've
always tried to be that."
Today, he's busy
fielding contest calls and offering his patented "Grrrrrrowl" to
Susan Kirk, a White Rock listener who's celebrating a 40th birthday.
Don pulls out a couple
of folders full of letters requesting the growl from women aged 16 to 60.
Willy phones in and they
swap corny elephant jokes and make arrangements to meet at Don's Tsawwassen
house for dinner.
"I'll bring the
bungee cord," cracks Willy. "Love ya."
Don says he encouraged
Willy when he decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
"It's a tough business
but he has a flair for it."
Down on Seymour Street
at CFOX, Willy, 27, and on-air partner Larry Hennessey, 30, are in full stride.
They've got a DJ on
the line from a radio station in Honolulu and are kidding him that the
Vancouver temperature is 97 degrees Farenheit.
According to Willy and
Larry, they "started out as Mormon missionaries who got into radio when
they knocked on the door of a radio station director."
And if you'll believe
that, there's probably some prime desert land in Utah they could sell you.
They've been hitting
the airwaves from 6-10 a.m. for 2 1/2 years, after spending a couple of years
as a team in Thunder Bay.
Before getting into
radio, Willy - who went to school in Surrey from age seven to 16 - was a
stand-up comic at Punchlines and worked as a computer programmer.
But he says radio was
in his blood and he learned a lot of what he knows from his father.
"He's a lot of
fun to hang out with," says Willy. "We're taking an auto mechanics
course together and we play golf. And if we're together at a media function, we
get to badger each other."
The kidding goes back
a long way.
When he was growing
up, says Willy, there were two telephones in the house.
His dad used to string
his kids along by making fake calls from one phone to the other.
"He'd call us up
on one of the phones and pretend he was from the newspaper or something and
he'd have us going for 10 minutes," says Percy.
These days, Willy says
he sometimes gets his own back on his dad by calling him at work when Don's on
the air at CISL.
"I know my father
answers his own phone so we'll call him and say: 'Hello, is Don Percy there?
We've been listening to you and . . .