Fast forward about 40 years, one day I remembered the Leica and gave my dad, still in Ohio, a call to see whatever happened to the camera. He said he had no idea but he'd look for it. About a half a year goes by and a box shows up at my home in Arizona and inside was the old Leica, three lenses, a bunch of Leica accessories and an old Zeiss Ikon Medium format camera - he had found them in the attic.
My only experience with any Leica was when an early photography mentor, my high school physics teacher, occasionally and rather anxiously allowed me to snap a few pictures with his M3. He was extremely protective of it, however—it represented a very
substantial investment for a faculty member of a U.S. public secondary school in the 1960s—and always followed me around while I was trying it out.
But, frankly, it didn't strike me as superior, either optically or ergonomically, to my father's
pre-war Zeiss Contax II, the other classic rangefinder from the golden era of photojournalism. Although my physics teacher was always eager to point out to me that his 50mm lens (a Summilux, if memory serves) was
coated, the results didn't seem any sharper than those I got with my Dad's Contax and its collapsible, uncoated, and slightly scratched 50mm Sonnar (first attachment). That old Contax was like an extension of my eyes and hands. Despite being manual everything, it required almost no effort to operate and the focus was always spot-on.
Alas, the Contax disappeared sometime between my departure for college in New England and my family's return from a foreign service assignment in 1974. However, during that assignment in then West Germany, my father made several trips to the Soviet bloc—and during one of them he picked up it's spitting image (sorry: Americanism for visual duplicate),
a Kiev-branded rangefinder which is still in my possession (second attachment).
Sooo, where is the camera nostalgia thread?