Daily Herald opinion: Requiem for Ribfest: A jewel among suburban celebrations is gone, but its spirit will live on

Beloved traditions do not fade easily or painlessly. Sometimes, they may not truly fade at all.

Many suburban residents, especially in DuPage County, likely well remember the earliest years of Naperville’s Ribfest. The year 1987 does not seem so long ago.

That was the year that, according to news reports, someone at a family gathering of then-Naperville Park District Executive Director Glen Ekey brought up the idea of a community festival focusing on ribs. Ekey shared it with Bruce Erickson, a founding member of a new local service group calling itself the Exchange Club of Naperville, and the club members ran with it.

And, boy, did they run. From the first three-day gathering around Father’s Day 1988, the event would soon become a weeklong celebration scheduled around July 4, attracting festivalgoers in the hundreds of thousands. Barbecue experts from around the world would vie for the festival’s top honors, and barbecue lovers from across the Chicago area and beyond would come for the food, the top-quality musical entertainment and other attractions. Over the course of The Exchange Club’s 37-year lifespan, Ribfest would be a major factor behind $22 million the group collected and redistributed to community agencies and projects.

And in all that time, despite its great success and massive scope, the event would always remain at its heart a celebration of community. It called on the services of hundreds of volunteers, and followers of the festival from year to year would marvel how Exchange Club members who would hold the operation’s top leadership posts one year would return the next to handle the most basic, unheralded functions required to keep the event running.

That is a quality highly to be admired, of course. But it should not go without saying that it is also a quality that repeats itself hundreds of times every summer in community festivals built around food and culture from St. Charles to Wauconda, from Mount Prospect to Elgin and nearly every town in between.

Ribfest was perhaps a crown jewel among such events, but it was not alone. So, although the ravages of COVID and the circumstances of changing times have forced it and Naperville’s Exchange Club to end their run, its spirit still runs strong in the veins that connect and feed our suburbs. We mourn the loss of the event. We must not forget what it brought us, what it truly celebrated and what still remains.

For a story our Katlyn Smith and Alicia Fabbre reported last weekend, the director of operations for Uncle Bub’s BBQ, a Westmont restaurant that won numerous top Ribfest trophies, described the legacy of the event about as well as could be done.

“It was a time that I'm always going to remember fondly, so I do understand that it's come to its end, and that is a sad thing,” Jay Rushford said. “But the memories that it made, really, the reputation that it had, lives on forever.”

So it does.