What is surprising, in light of his father's important position at Warner & Swasey, is that no record has thus far emerged of J.W.'s own employment with that firm.
Early Fecker catalogs refer un-specifically to his "15 years of experience before launching his own company, in manufacturing a long line of fire control instruments for the U.S. Army and Navy experience” which does indeed suggest other Ordinance Dept. commissions awarded to W. & S., builder, for example, of the Army's unsuccessful prismatic sight for the 1903 Springfield. However, telescopic sight expert C. S. Landis reported that Fecker's last employment immediately prior to founding his Cleveland Enterprise in 1922 had been with optics giant Bausch & Lomb in Rochester. An explanation for this apparent anomaly may lie in the peculiar circumstance that W. & S., although manufacturing rifle and spotting scopes, as well as astronomical instruments, actually "outsourced" all the lenses and prisms, acquiring some of them, in all probability, from B. & L., which had long supplied the majority of American telescope makers.
Fecker's earliest advertisement in Arms and the Man (bimonthly predecessor of American Rifleman), appearing in the Aug. 1, 1922 issue, did not make immediately clear what, specifically, he was prepared to offer. Rather, it suggested he was willing to build telescopic sights, equipped with lenses of his own manufacture, to the customer's individual requirements. A few issues later, readers of his small ad were presented with the briefest of descriptions of a new riflescope: ¾ inch clear-aperture objective lens, 18 ½ in. length, 6- and 10-power. Advertisements appearing shortly thereafter noted that fittings would be supplied to permit use of his new scope in all contemporary mounts: a V-pronged clamp-ring for use with V-notched Stevens or Winchester front mounts, or (at presumably much higher cost) a "Pope-style" rib for Pope and certain Stevens mounts.
Perhaps deliberately, these early ads drew no special attention to the new instrument's most novel operating characteristic: a sliding erector lens for distance focusing, as opposed to the adjustable objective lens so long familiar to users of Malcolm, Stevens, Winchester, and after 1929, Lyman, scopes. Conditioned, as most users would have been, to "conventional" focusing, the Fecker mid-tube "bulge" may have looked something like a toad in a snake's belly out of place.

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And considering the Rifleman policy of reprinting prior articles in separate publications, it's odd further use was never made of this remarkable resource.
Curiously, "A Precise Method of Focusing Telescopic Sights," Fecker's initial submission, makes no mention at all of the unique "Fecker system" of adjustment, which by then, just three months before his first advertisement appeared, must already have been "on the drawing board," if not in production. Of course, given the notorious delays characteristic of magazine publishing, this article might well have been submitted many months before Fecker drew up his final design.
What might be construed as the shooting-world's "official" recognition of the new Fecker scope came in the form of a half-page description in the Rifleman of March 15, 1923. This unsigned review was extremely positive in its appraisal, but of course, with the feelings of other advertisers to consider, invidious comparisons were not brought forth.
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As previously indicated, Fecker scopes produced prior to around 1924 had to be adapted to the mountings of other makers, an unavoidable expedient that Fecker no doubt found galling. The same expedient, incidentally, to which John Unertl also resorted when, after years in the employ of Fecker, he set up his own shop. It cannot be overemphasized that no externally adjustable riflescope can be better, functionally, than its mounts. The two are absolutely co-equal in importance. And with his characteristic thoroughness, Fecker described how truly accurate micrometer mounts should be manufactured in the May 1, 1925 Rifleman: "Telescope Mount Troubles."
By the time this piece appeared in print, Fecker had for almost a year been offering a set of mounts that largely satisfied the stringent requirements set forth in his article. Given the ubiquity, today, of aluminum alloys, it is psychologically impossible, three-quarters of a century later, to appreciate how impressively modern and "scientific" Fecker's gleaming Duralumin mounts would have appeared to shooters conditioned to rust-blued steel. Later to be called his "Standard Mounts," they were so superior to everything else on the market as to deserve truly the boast, "a class of their own." But even this achievement was soon surpassed by an improvement Fecker called his "Precision Mount," which he began to advertise in the same May issue of 1925.
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Although few shooters would have been in a position to appreciate the significance of this event, optics experts and industry insiders of the like of Crossman, Landis, and Whelen, should have recognized that rather more than a mere change of factory location had taken place. No gun writer of the period, however, seems to have taken particular note of it, and none of the many reviews of Fecker scopes written from the 1920's through the 1950's remarked the international scientific fame of the maker. A good many of Fecker's Rifleman Ads in the early 1930's listed "astronomical telescopes" along with other optical products, such as spotting scopes, as did his earliest catalogs, but this disclosure seems to have provoked little curiosity among the cadre of gun writers.
Scopes manufactured in Cleveland were so marked, as were the early-production mounts. Inexplicably, considering Fecker's attention to detail, scopes produced afterwards in Pittsburgh were never thus identified. All Fecker scopes however bear serial numbers; a small thing, seemingly, but suggestive of a respect for workmanship not exhibited by the optics of Stevens and Winchester. When rights to the A5 were acquired by the Lyman Co., serial numbering commenced immediately, an "attitudinal" change that has always much impressed me.
It will probably come as no surprise that Fecker's serial number records are done the way of those Malcolm, Sidel, and possible even Unertl. No. 825 bears the Cleveland marking, so was not manufactured after 1926; no. 1404, displaying no address, must be post ''26; no. 6053 can be correlated with a date of mid-1937; and no. 10393, with the year 1950. This crude timetable, I'm ashamed to say, is the best I can provide at present.  Any reader who can associate a serial number with a known date is urged to share that data with the author.
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Fecker's supremacy was finally challenged in 1934, by Lyman's new 1-1/8" objective Targetspot, in 8- and 10-power. This soon-to-be-famous model was an impressive advance over the two "antique" instruments Lyman had inherited from Stevens and Winchester, but handicapped by mounts much inferior to those of Fecker, and not the equal, optically, of Fecker's 1-1/2", 16-power, model of 1932. This threat from Middlefield was real enough, but not so grave, ultimately, as a personnel loss sustained at the same critical time: In 1934, John Unertl, hired by Fecker shortly after he emigrated from Germany to America, in 1928,"jumped ship" to set up his own family-operated shop in Pittsburgh. This modest beginning might, at the time, have seemed less worrisome to the laird of Observatory Hill than developments at Lyman, but events would eventually prove otherwise.
Unertl's departure was only part of the "brain-drain" afflicting Fecker about this time. Possibly more galling to Fecker was the "treason" of "chief optician" Hageman, and his very able son Wray, both lured away by Lyman to design an improved internally-adjustable hunting scope, efforts that in 1937 culminated in the legendary "Alaskan". This hemorrhage of talent occurred at a time when many major scientific commissions seemed to be coming Fecker's way, such as a 61" telescope for Harvard, and a planetarium for the American Museum of Natural History, so it would be enlightening to know who, amidst all this bustle, was attending to riflescope development. The internal structure of Fecker's diversified domain, his division of labor for the design of products so radically different in form and function, remains ambiguous; the senior Hageman, for example, is reported to have been involved in designing the giant Perkins mirror, but worked as well on riflescopes.
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This pledge presumably expired when the Eastern matches were moved away from Sea Girt in 1934, but even before that transition, the growing responsibility of managing his flourishing optics enterprise had begun to erode Fecker's "range time." In 1928, he attended Sea Girt, but "could not spare the time to visit Perry this year." The following year must have been even busier: "conspicuous by his absence (at S.G.) was J.W. Fecker, working on a new telescope for Harvard." He returned to Sea Girt in 1930, but after 1932, his name seems to vanish from the roster of celebrities at both events. Sporadically reported in subsequent years is the presence on "Commercial Row" of a Fecker representative, the unenviable duty of whom would have been to compete with energetic John Unertl.
In the later years, as is well known, Unertl became a veritable fixture at Camp Perry, and other cross-roads of the shooting-world, such as NRA conventions. His professional interests narrowly focused, in dramatic contrast to the diversified concerns of Fecker, Unertl could well afford to make time for these events. Though Fecker may have been represented by his technicians, this was hardly the same, for customers, as meeting the maker himself.
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Fecker's personal involvement in the company he founded scarcely outlasted the war: he died Nov. 11, 1945, of an unspecified cause, "after a week's illness, at the age of 54," according to a very brief obituary in the Jan., 1946, Rifleman. (Noted, however, was that he had constructed "some of the world's largest telescopic lenses and mirrors.") His passing appears to have severed his family's three-generation optics tradition; he was survived by two daughters, along with his wife, and buried, presumably in a family plot, in Brooklyn, N.Y. 
An August, 1946, Rifleman advertisement revealed that the J. W. Fecker Company had been incorporated. The Riflescope division appeared, at first, to flourish in the surging post-war economy, with the venerable 1-1/8" model now "upgraded" to 1-1/4", and the 1-1/2" to 1-5/8". Strangely, for an operation with the technology to turn out astronomical lenses as large as twelve inches, Fecker's new management obviously considered it necessary to match Unertl's top-of-the-line two-inch instrument. Along with all others in the industry, post-war Fecker energetically promoted the lens-coating technology perfected during the war years, not only offering anti-reflection coatings on all new optics, but actively soliciting for the business of retro-coating pre-war optics.
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