It is a shame you weren't able to get your friend's rifle. Sometimes things like that just slip through our grasp and get sold off to someone else to whom they don't mean much.

I searched high and low today for a Charlew W. Newell from Elmira, NY. No real luck- at least nothing conclusive. Looks like that marksman is lost to the ages. OTOH I ran across a biography of Brophy that says he was an active match shooter in the 1930s so maybe he was one of Newell's teammates. Brophy would have been 21 in 1936 I think.