Middletown Area Businesses - What's the latest word on the sale of the Jug?

Burgers are out for John Ridge

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By: Fred Sennet

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He is still looking for new horizons

John Ridge admired the hamburgers at The Jug. He also wanted a good cup of coffee which he had trouble finding in Middletown.

Ridge, always on the lookout for a new project, bought The Jug and then opened his own coffee shop, Java Johnny’s Midtowne Cafe at the Highview Center.

Now, he is leaving the burger business after eight years when he can find someone to keep up the 70-year-old Middletown icon called The Jug.

Food, however, was not his specialty. The Internet is.

Ridge, a Middletown High School graduate who learned about business at The Ohio State University and by starting his own businesses, had an earlier passion and that was the cello, and while in high school performed with the Middletown Symphony Orchestra while honing skills on the piano.

At first, he thought about a career in music. “But I heard enough about bands and decided computers were my future,” he said. At Ohio State he studied economics, did some scuba diving and opened his first business, a landscaping operation that developed customers in upscale Upper Arlington.

He then went to work for a small computer outfit, where he was one of 20 employees, then started another business with a friend and partner which provided Internet services, then sold it in 1999.

While in Columbus, he met his wife, Jennifer, who worked at restaurant and she studied dermatology at the OSU School of Medicine before attending the medical school at Wright State University. When Jennifer took over the practice of Dr. Alvin Neimer here, they moved to Middletown.

It was on a visit to Middletown earlier that they went on a garden tour, which included the Gardner House on Gardner Place off Tytus Avenue, which became their home after buying it from owner Perry Thatcher.

“Until then, we had thought about moving to North Carolina,” Ridge said, “but Middletown is a good community and safe place to raise kids and we wanted a big family.” It’s a place where he plans to keep as his home base.

The Ridges got what they wanted not only in the house, where they have attempted to restore it over the past few years, but a large family since they have five children.

“We consider ourselves stewards since it is such a beautiful property,” he said of the Gardner House. “Anything we have done is in a restoration mode and we have tried to replace it with exactly what is there. And with a family of seven we use every square foot of it.”

His memories of the Gardner House go back to the days when he played the cello in high school and competed for a Valda Wilkerson String Scholarship when the competition was held there. “I remember thinking that it would be a neat place to live,” he said.

When Ridge sold his company to Voyager, he was 39 years old and he wasn’t ready to retire, so he formed a new company here which sells hardware and software to people who want to do their own e-line commerce.

It began when associates in New York City, who were working with arts groups there, asked if he could develop a system for ticket sales. He did all the ticketing for the Film Society of Lincoln Center which stages the New York Film Festival as well as groups in Cincinnati.

Both the DotCom crash and 9/11 hurt his business in New York and Ridge redeveloped things, concentrating on point of sale equipment which he also uses to track sales at both The Jug and Johnny Java’s, allowing him to know hourly sales at both businesses no matter where he is.

He also works with local groups like Lyric Theater and Rising Phoenix which he said couldn’t afford to be online fulltime with Ticketmaster. Instead, his company can handle ticket sales for them. He also works with Middfest and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which occasionally helps book events.

Ridge sees opportunity in many places. Although he knew nothing about the food business, his acquisition of The Jug, a city institution for nearly 75 years, points out how his mind works.

“ One day I drove in and ordered a frosty mug of root beer and it was brought to me in a Styrofoam cup with the explanation that there wasn’t a mug for me,” he said. “It just wasn’t fulfilling my memory of The Jug and I thought it might need some help or that the owner was thinking about retiring.”

As luck would have it, Ridge said, owner Dick Henderson was thinking about retiring so he bought it. “I thought I could bring it back to the way I remembered it,” he said.

Ridge had the building gutted, put in a new kitchen, hooked it up to his computer systems and standardized the quality of the meat. “I saw something that could be fixed,” he said. And, of course, he bought 400 beer mugs to bring the tradition he recalled.

If and when he sells The Jug to someone who wants to keep up the tradition, he hopes to turn to other projects

“I see so many opportunities, so many things I’d like to do and I don’t want to be a spectator,” Ridge said.