The year was 1983. Larry Price and Michael W. Perry didn\u2019t know each other, but when Hal Lewis, aka J. Akuhead Pupule, Hawaii\u2019s top-rated morning deejay, died, radio station owner Cecil \u201cCec\u201d Heftel tapped the pair to take over the prime morning drive shift.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a pretty amazing thing,\u201d Perry recalled Saturday in a phone call from Los Angeles. \u201cIt took about six months, I think, for us to gel. It takes awhile: You find each other\u2019s timing, you find out how to work with them, you find out what\u2019s funny, what they do best, what you do best. And I think it just clicked sometime around six months, seven months in, and we just had a blast after that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The duo clicked with island radio audiences too. \u201cThe Perry &Price Show\u201d reigned as the No. 1 choice for morning listeners for nearly its entire 33-year run.<\/p>\n
Price, who died Friday at age 91, retired from KSSK in May 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe worked six days a week, six hours a day, for 33 years together, so we kind of knew each other,\u201d Perry said. \u201cI was the annoying younger brother that he never wanted, and he was the older brother that I really needed. I\u2019m an only child, and he was the older brother that really clued me into a whole bunch of stuff that I had no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Price gained fame as a radio personality, he was already well-known to sports fans in the islands as a star football player at the University of Hawaii, where he was elected captain three times from 1962 to 1964 and played in three Hula Bowl college all-star games, and as head volleyball coach at UH from 1969 to 1972 and head football coach from 1974 to 1976.<\/p>\n
Don’t miss out on what’s happening!<\/strong><\/p>\n Stay in touch with breaking news, as it happens, conveniently in your email inbox. It’s FREE!<\/p>\n Larry David Price was born in November 1934 and grew up in Kaaawa. A Roosevelt High School graduate and Army veteran, he received a bachelor\u2019s degree from UH in 1967, a master\u2019s in education from UH in 1971, a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California in 1985, and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University.<\/p>\n According to UH, he served as director of the school\u2019s Small Business Management Program, and he also was a professor at Chaminade It was during his three seasons as head coach that UH became an NCAA Division I member and changed the team name to the Rainbow Warriors.<\/p>\n On Sept. 13, 1975, Coach Price and the Rainbow Warriors played the first official sporting event in the newly built 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium. Hawaii lost the game but finished the season with a winning record.<\/p>\n From coaching football Price transitioned into media, working as a TV reporter for KITV and writing a column for MidWeek. But he made his biggest and most lasting impact on radio and OC16 sportscasts.<\/p>\n KHON2 newscaster Howard Dashefsky remembers Price from their years doing play-by-play coverage of Oahu Interscholastic Assocation high school football games on OC16.<\/p>\n \u201cThe guy\u2019s up at, what, 3 in the morning to do \u2018Perry &Price\u2019 and he\u2019s doing these high school football games that go to 10 o\u2019clock at night, and in the middle, he\u2019s going to Chaminade University to teach. I don\u2019t know how he did it,\u201d Dashefsky said.<\/p>\n Price was also \u201cprobably the most generous guy I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the 25 years of doing OIA high school football for OC 16, he donated every penny that he earned back to the OIA, and he also wrote the biggest check at the very beginning to start and create the OIA Foundation. He was instrumental in getting the OIA on TV and getting OC16 to start broadcasting those games,\u201d Dashefsky said.<\/p>\n Every year Price gifted the OC16 crew with There was another thing about Price that impressed Dashefsky as well.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was also probably The key to Price\u2019s success on KSSK and OC16 Longtime television newscaster Lynne Waters recalled coming to Hawaii from Texas in 1981 and listening very carefully to how her local colleagues pronounced local words and names. Price was one of them, and it was only through a chance conversation with News Director Don Rockwell that she Hawaii radio veteran Dave Lancaster relished the experience of seeing and hearing \u201cCoach\u201d become \u201cDr. Price.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMost people who only know Larry from the radio think he\u2019s an uneducated local football player he portrayed on the radio to counter the polished Michael W. Perry radio pro guy,\u201d Lancaster said in a social media post Saturday.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was an act. We all knew that but when I got to witness him speak at a function as Dr. Price, it was an experience. He was not the bumbling mispronouncing radio guy. It gave me an even greater admiration for a man I already admired.\u201d<\/p>\n Sweetie Pacarro, the third member of the \u201cPerry &Price\u201d team, said Price was \u201cmore than the legend the world admired.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe was family to me: a father, a mentor and guiding light. For over 30 years, I worked alongside him in radio but what I gained went far beyond the microphone,\u201d she said. \u201cHis wisdom, his belief in education and his quiet generosity shaped not just my career but the person I am today. Larry\u2019s legacy isn\u2019t only in his achievements \u2014 it\u2019s in the lives he touched, the lessons he shared and the love he gave. I am forever grateful to have called him my mentor and my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n In a statement Friday, \u201cMy connection to Coach Price goes back to my days as a walk-on player at the University of Hawaii in 1965. He believed in me, he challenged me, and he pushed me to be better every single day as a player and as a person,\u201d Blangiardi said.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter my playing days, he brought me back to coach alongside him. I had the privilege of serving as his associate head coach and defensive coordinator when he became head coach at UH. But more importantly, I knew that I had earned his trust. That meant everything to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Price received the UH Distinguished Alumni Award in 1989, was inducted into the University of Hawaii Sports Circle of Honor in 1994, and received the UH Founders Alumni Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.<\/p>\n He was inducted into the Hawaii Sports Hall of Fame in 2022.<\/p>\n Funeral arrangements have not been announced. Price is survived by his wife, May, and his nephew, Eugene Price.<\/p>\n Perry and Pacarro will broadcast a special tribute to Price during their \u201cPerry &The Posse\u201d show from 5 to 10 a.m. Monday on KSSK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The year was 1983. Larry Price and Michael W. Perry didn\u2019t know each other, but when Hal Lewis,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[31007,18,117,19,17,337],"class_list":["post-411222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-editors","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116317248824389189","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nUniversity.<\/p>\n
\nspecial-run shirts and sweatshirts, and when Dashefsky\u2019s first daughter was born, Price bought him a koa rocking chair and had it delivered to his house.<\/p>\n
\nthe smartest man I\u2019ve
\never known, and he just preached and championed education,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026 I remember when he was doing that doctorate at Stanford. He came off as just the \u2018local brother\u2019 on the radio, but if you really knew him and had a conversation with him, he was the most intelligent guy to talk about anything, and it was just kind of mind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nwas that he never sounded like he was the smartest guy in the room. His use of malapropisms and mispronunciations endeared him to several generations of
\nradio audiences. He also popularized \u201ckatoosh!\u201d as an oft-repeated term for an
\nexceptionally hard hit in football.<\/p>\n
\ndiscovered that the governor of Hawaii was not \u201cGov. Harry Yoshi\u201d but George Ariyoshi.<\/p>\n
\nHonolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi called Price \u201ca true legend.\u201d<\/p>\n