Film discovered in a camera after 80 years reveals a surprise — and a Minnesota mystery

About 80 years ago, someone pointed a Kodak Brownie camera at a sailor and took some snapshots.

Click. The shutter on the simple camera flicked open for a 50th of a second. The moment captured on film shows the young man with a broad grin, his hand raised in a salute. He's wearing dress blues with a single white stripe on the cuff and a cap tilted at a jaunty angle.

Click. The sailor stands next to another young man with a familial resemblance. Perhaps it's an older brother, looking dapper in a double-breasted suit.

Click. The sailor is standing next to a car parked by a house. Maybe he's home on leave.

There were no more clicks. The camera was never used again and the film inside it was forgotten, left undeveloped. Decades passed. No one ever saw the pictures of the sailor.

In July of 2022, Keith Yearman was browsing a vendor's table at the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago. An old camera sitting among used books and electronic gear caught his eye.

"I just had to have it, for some reason," Yearman said. He bought it for $20.

Yearman, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Carol Stream, is a geography professor at the College of DuPage. He's also an avid street photographer and specializes in film photography and old photos. He has a collection of about 30 vintage cameras.

This one turned out to be a Brownie No. 2A sold by Eastman Kodak from 1907 to 1936. It was known as a box camera because it was basically a rectangular cardboard box with "leatherette" covering, with a roll of film in one end and a lens in the other. Originally costing $3, it helped bring amateur snapshot photography to the masses. Kodak made more than 2 million of them, according to the Brownie Camera Page.

A week or so after he bought the Brownie, Yearman opened it — and was surprised to see a roll of film still in it.

The film, which was tightly wound around a metal spool with a wooden core, was a now- rare Type 116 film, first introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1899. It's so obsolete that even the specialty camera shops that Yearman took the film to in Chicago couldn't develop it. They suggested that Yearman send the film to Marian Early.

Early, who runs Custom Photographic Printing in Rochester, N.Y. , is one of the few people in the country who can hand-process 116 type film. But she warned Yearman that she couldn't make any promises for film this old. But for $25, she'd give it a try.

"The film itself was totally unlabeled," Early said. "The processing is a little bit of guesswork. The film is old. You don't know if it's been fogged. There's different chemistry for different films."

"I said we absolutely have to try it," Yearman said.

On Aug. 25, Yearman got a call from an excited Early. "She said, 'You're not going to believe it. We've got some images.' "

A roll of 116 film allows for six exposures. Three of the six from Yearman's roll contained images, all featuring the young sailor.

"I was very surprised, to tell you the truth," Early said.

The images — surprisingly clear — made both Yearman and Early wonder who the sailor was and what became of him.

"It was kind of like, wow. You've got to wonder where this guy went, was he in the service, did he get back?" Early said.

Yearman has many old family photos from the 1920s and 1940s, which he considers valuable keepsakes. He thought the sailor's family would want the lost images — if he could only find that family.

And so the search began.

Yearman shared his find with an online Chicago photography group and an Honor Flight veterans group, asking if anyone had any suggestions about how to find the family of the sailor. A Chicago TV station did a story about the pictures, as did an online photography magazine. No family claimed them.

Yearman went back to the street market to talk to the vendor who sold him the camera, but that, too, was a dead end.

He studied the photos and realized one contained a clue. In the background, there was a sedan — maybe a Packard, maybe a Ford — with whitewall tires and what looks like a raccoon tail hanging from the radio antenna. The front license plate is just visible. Yearman made out the number 281 856 and "Minnesota 1942."

He contacted vehicle services officials in Minnesota, only to be told they don't keep records back that far.

Still, Yearman hasn't given up.

He scoured the photos for more clues. If they were taken in Minnesota, it may have been in the early spring or late fall: There are no leaves on the trees, but no snow on the ground, either.

And if they were taken in 1942, it was a year in which American sailors serving during World War II would fight in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway and the Battle of Guadalcanal.

"Worst-case scenario, what if that guy never made it home? These could end up being the last photos of that guy," Yearman said.

That made Yearman want to find the family of the unknown sailor even more. So he's asking for your help.

If you know something anything about the photos, he asks that you contact him at keithyearman@hotmail.com.