I'm glad somebody read my post. I thought I had bored everyone to sleep or they thought it not worth noticing.
It could be a Leica, and I did consider Leica when I wrote that. Obviously it's not the one for sale. I find the provenance interesting and not entirely credible. That's a very expensive gift to bestow on the man who collects your laundry. Still, it has the card and the story and probably no one can disprove it now.
The one for sale is an early Leica, having no rangefinder (focus had to be estimated or measured), a simple viewfinder, and a non-detachable lens. These are retroactively designated Model I. Leica called it a Model A at the time. I have handled one of these -- a customer in the camera store where I worked in the late 1970s had bought one new in Germany in 1927 and still used it. One day he brought in the original receipt and box to show me. These early ones are black on brass (plus leather) like this one, except for the control knobs and lens, which are nickel plated.
The current model in 1937 was the IIIa, also known as G. It was made from 1935 to 1938. I owned one of these and I'm very familiar with it. By that time they had a coupled rangefinder on top. These days you can buy them for about $250, so I'm not surprised that the reserve on Amelia's wasn't met, even though a very early Leica such as the one for sale is worth more, and there's the celebrity provenance, if true.
Ken Rockwell has a nice writeup on the IIIa here:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/leica/screw-mount/iiia.htmThere is a top view for comparison in Ken's article.
I ruled out Leica for several reasons in my analysis of the photo. The camera in the photo appears to be a bit shorter (width) than a Leica, with more squared-off or "stop sign" ends rather than the Leica's round ends, and the pattern of black and bright areas didn't look right. Bright plated was much more popular than black, once it became available. Even if it was a black body, it has black showing where there would be plating. The mystery camera does look like it could have a rangefinder, but again it didn't seem to match exactly. Also the lend barrel (or bellows) appears to be black, while a Leica's lens was always bright plated, and it appears to be wider than the Leica lenses. The end which is bright looks more to me like the shutter assembly of a bellows-mounted lens than the end of a Leitz Elmar or Summar (the two normal lenses; they were sold with one or the other, usually the Elmar).
There was also the report that the Luke Field inventory included a case for a "Kodak Brownie" although we do not know on what basis that identification was made. It's "woman's size 11 shoe" all over again -- we have the conclusion but not the details on which it was based. But while someone might see a case marked Kodak and infer that it was a Brownie, they wouldn't misread Leica as Kodak.
However -- and this is all just an exercise for fun -- just like sextant boxes, the contents don't have to match the labeling, and like sextants, there's no hard evidence that any Kodak was on the second flight. I did a lot of looking through camera collector web sites looking for a match of any brand, and I never did find one with which I was totally happy.
So thanks for reading, and for finding the camera for sale, and for playing detective with me. Maybe we will solve this mini-mystery, and maybe we'll just enjoy trying.
LTM,
Don