Every year about now, as the last stretch of August rolls in, Spokane used to start buzzing — because Pig Out in the Park was right around the corner. Not this year. After 44 years, the 2025 festival was the final one, and this is the first end-of-summer in more than four decades that Riverfront Park won't fill up with sausage smoke and live music. If you grew up here, you feel it in your bones.

My history with it goes back to high school, in the late '80s — best I can figure, '88 or '89, back when it was a smaller, scrappier affair. Just like me. Me and K.C. and whoever else was around, chasing down whatever smelled best. Then the Marine Corps took me overseas for the better part of a decade. When I got back to Spokane in '97, Pig Out was right where I'd left it — and I made up for lost time, hitting it every August with a new crew: Toraj, Bobby, Cory, and Brian. Life pulled me away again — a dozen years up in Missoula — but when I landed back home in 2017, one of the first things I did come late August was drift into that park and get in line. Some things just pull you home.

What started in 1979 as Bill Burke's little "Yum Yum Restaurant Fair" — a couple of tents, a stage left over from Expo '74, and free admission — became 65 food booths, 250-plus dishes, and more than 100 free concerts spread over six days by the river.

This week, Bill called me up to tell me how it really began — and it turns out Pig Out was a music festival first, a food festival by necessity. “I was traveling a lot then, and I saw all these cities with music festivals, and realized Spokane didn't have one,” he told me. “The real problem was funding — so I thought, well, if we sell food, we can fund the show.” Food, in other words, was the engine that powered it all.

And the food. Oh, the food. Azar's was flipping gyros there since 1981, which means they fed me at every single Pig Out I ever went to. And in the later years you'd find me in line at Bibby's Italian Sausage for one of their New York–style sandwiches — a small-world thing that always made me smile, because Sarah and Josh Bibby were working with me back at Outback Steakhouse before they built that booth into a Pig Out legend. They did us proud then, and they've done us proud every August since. That's Pig Out in a nutshell: the whole city, and half its restaurant history, gathered in one park.

Here's the part that gets me. As Bill Burke told the Spokesman-Review, “A lot of people don't know it was just one guy who was running the whole thing.” One guy, 44 years, nearly four million happy people who drove in from as far as Florida and New York for free music and a paper tray of something delicious. “I will miss everything about it,” he told the paper. “It's time.” He's turning 75, with three grandkids in Phoenix waiting on him. Fair enough, Bill.

One more thing, and it matters to him that I say it. When Bill heard I was writing this, he wrote back to make sure the credit got spread around. Yes, he started it and yes he ran it — but Pig Out was a joint project between his own Burke Marketing and the Six Bridges Arts Association, which has raised somewhere north of $8 million over the years to keep the gates open and the music free. Add the participating businesses and a long list of sponsors, and forty-four Augusts turns out to be a lot of hands.

We'll feel the hole it leaves. As one 33-year regular told the Spokesman-Review, “We have Bloomsday, Hoopfest and Pig Out. Those are the things that make Spokane.” There's talk of new events downtown, but nobody's calling them a replacement — because there isn't one. Some things you don't replace. You just say thank you.

But here's the good news: a few pieces of Pig Out are still out there if you know where to look. Sarah and Josh's Bibby's Italian Sausage is still going strong — you'll find them at Green Bluff, the Interstate Fair, and events all over town, doing the same great job they always have. Go get one. That sausage tastes even better when you know it's carrying a little Pig Out history with it.

And honestly, I don't know how to properly thank you, Bill Burke. So I'll do it the best way I know how: by raising a cold No-Li Born & Raised IPA in your honor — a Spokane beer for a Spokane legend — and wishing you well as you head on down the road. Enjoy those grandkids in Phoenix. You've more than earned the rest. From all of us in Spokane: thank you, for 44 years of feeding this city like family.

— Rob