February 1986<\/a>, said he retired with the sale.\n<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m older, can\u2019t do the things that I used to be able to do,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t pick up kegs anymore and walk them to the cooler. It\u2019s just time. The business was great to me. I enjoyed it. I can\u2019t tell you how enriching it has been to meet so many people, most of them wonderful people. My staff is a great group, we\u2019re like family here. Most of my staff has been with me for 25 to 30 years, and we\u2019re all still together, but \u2026 I want to emphasize that what made me successful is the staff that I\u2019m surrounded by, and how well they\u2019ve treated me and I\u2019ve treated them over the years. So it\u2019s been a fun ride.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kovacs said the new owner, who couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment Thursday afternoon, told him there were no immediate changes planned for the pub or its staff. <\/p>\n
Joseph \u201cRipper\u201d Rich opened the pub in December 1983.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 40-year-old Bethlehem pub changed hands this week, as its owner prepares to retire. The sale of Ripper\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,60,182,435,436,289,432],"class_list":["post-233964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-business","tag-local-news","tag-restaurants-food-and-drink","tag-retail","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}