My heart strings pulled, but the realities of the situation were compelling. I had neither the time, inclination, and didn’t want to make the financialĬommitment. It would have needed a small fortune to bring it up to speed. When I went back, I saw the company in the shape I figured it would be in. When my father died, my mother (who did not have a clue about the technology here) asked if I was interested in coming back to run the company. Ultimately I became a Division President for that organization. We used Leitz autocollimators and related equipment in our optical testing. I took a job with Leitz, a well known optical instrument company. I elected to resign at that point and move on. Secondly I could see that my father was not doing the necessary training and improvement for future development and expansion. Going into the late ’70’s several issues were at play. I was schooled as a mechanical engineer because that was what was expected. He also had quite an abrasive side and could alienate people fairly easily. My father John Unertl Jr., was a brilliant engineer, but frankly didn’t care much at all about ‘marketing’, relegating this to mostly bullshit. This gradually built a resentment within my father and their relationship began to fall apart. My grandmother being a company founder was quite reluctant to leave the company even though she was getting up in years. I don’t plan on writing a book here so I will condense this discussion to it’s bare bones form. Each conmtrbuted to, and detracted from the business. All of the personalities involved here were strong personalities in their own right. My grandparents started the company, my parents worked at the company, I worked at the company. I have the authority to discuss the intimate details of this since I AM the last John Unertl that worked at the company you are referring to. “ Gentlemen, Let me clear up some inaccurate or most likely a lot of bogus information out there regarding the Unertl Optical Company and make clear some facts about the rifle scopes themselves. AS one forum “expert” even made the idiotic claim that the Unertls were made in a barn. I saved Unertl’s only post on the matter and the rest of the posts were nonesense. I have long forgot where I got it from but a clever googler I’m sure could turn it up. I saved his comments as they were a peak into the history of a legendary firearms industry company. As usual with most gun forums, few of the poster new much about much and were posting all kinds of BS about Unertl and US Optics ( which did some shady stuff after Unertl went into limbo and got sued for their troubles irrespective of what you may hear otherwise) until most unexpectedly John R Unertl himself popped up to set the record straight.
Last night I got thinking about Unertl again after a friend asked me something about those old beauties and remembered some years ago there was a forum discussion some where or other about what happened. As you may have noticed my love o vintage target/varmint weapons and optics have been on my brain recently.
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