An old, ornate wood door still hangs on the front of the old house we're restoring. Oldtimers in Yankton think it's original to the house, so we're working to repair it. Several of the colored panes of glass were cracked and broken, but we have that resolved. We have safety glass in the center and a door knob that turns back and forth (we take those little luxuries for granted). Katie plans to paint all the ornate doo-dads in the door various funky colors. We'll post a picture when its done.

Many times, I've seen the sign pointing to Little Bend on the Missouri River southeast of Pierre but I didn't know that it was once called Big Bend.

Kathleen Gregg grew up in that area. She now lives in Washington State, but will always be a loyal South Dakotan. We talked today on the phone. She says they called her area the Pocket because the rural neighborhood was tucked in along the river. The rest of the world called it Big Bend. But when the gov't dammed the river, much of the bend was flooded so they changed the name to Little Bend.

What a demotion.

We're going to work on the old, original windows today. Miraculously, we got one of them to even open! We have all the broken panes replaced and now we're ready to scrape and paint the interior window frames.

Serious historic preservation work is now about to begin at Third & Pearl in olde Yankton, Dakota Territory, South Dakota. This is on the first block built in Yankton, above the river. We bought the old house next to our magazine office as a fixer-upper and we've been slowly gutting and repairing -- but now that the July/August issue is mailed, and we have the attention of carpenters, plumbers and electricians, we are about to reassemble the place.

Stop and see it if you get to Yankton. Otherwise, we'll give you a few updates here on the web.

The house was built by Territorial Gov. John Pennington in the late 1870s. He also built the building that has been the magazine's headquarters since 1987.

One of our readers directed us to a web post of a heartfelt letter from Joyce Glynn to her son, Michael, who died this month in a car accident. South Dakota has suffered a number of teen fatalities this month. It happens every spring and summer around graduation time. If only every young driver could read this.

Joyce is the editor of the Mellette County News. She and her husband, Roger, have two other children. They live on a ranch near White River in southcentral South Dakota.

We tried a link to the web site but it won't link, so here's how you get there: l) go to www.caringbridge.org 2) click on VISIT 3) enter michaelglynn

What do the Nazi war machine and South Dakota corn farmers have in common? Both spread around a lot of ammonia -- but for very different reasons. Nazi scientist Fritz Haber devised weapons and poisons around ammonia, a man-made nitrate. American scientists followed suit, according to a fine article in the new Smithsonian magazine. After WWII, our government had tons of ammonium nitrate. They considered dumping it on the forests to give the trees a treat, but someone in the ag department suggested they put it on the farmland to fertilize the soil.

For better or worse, farming has never been the same. As agri-experts toyed with fertilizers over the next few decades, crop yields soared. The Smithsonian article's author suggests that two of every five people alive today might not be here (because there wouldn't be enough food) if Haber and his cohorts hadn't invented synthetic nitrogen. (Well, give the guy in the ag department a little credit, too. Haber wanted to kill with his nitrates; our ag bureaucrat wanted to grow food.)

Corn dates back 9,000 years to the Mayan civilization, but the tall dark grass has really taken over the grocery store shelves since chemical fertilizers were invented. Today, a fourth of the merchandise at your local store consist of corn.

Of course, the nitrogen news isn't all positive. We've saturated the earth with nitrates, and that could eventually cause severe problems to modern civilization. Might it be Fritz Haber's unwittting revenge after all these years?

Some joker in Pennsylvania is in trouble for dumping old tires. We had a similar situation in Yankton County two years ago. Semi-trucks full of waste tires started showing up on my gravel road late one night. I called authorities, and they promptly talked to the Nebraskan who'd just bought the land adjacent to my farm. He waved a letter from the Corps of Engineers at them, and they figured he was legit. The next morning I called the state environmental office and asked if I could bury tires on my farm. They acted horrified. "Absolutely not!" they said. "It's against the law!"

I told them someone was breaking the law, then, because truckloads were being dumped in a ravine north of Yankton. They were less concerned when they found out it wasn't me that would be dumping the tires. Still, over the course of a few months, the state made him take most of the tires out. They allowed him to leave a few as some sort of compromise. Just as in the Pennsylvania case, he argued that he was actually filling and reclaiming a ravine.

My only point, in bringing this up, is that if you see a semi-truck loaded with old tires heading down your road, raise some hell early. Apparently this is a new scheme: you get paid for disposing of the tires, then you find somewhere to dump them as cheaply as possible.

The tires buried by Yankton are pushing out of the ground after this year's heavy rains. And there are lots of Russian thistles growing around them. Maybe I'll called the Weed Board and ask if I can grow thistle, too?

Am I a bad neighbor?

Bear Country, one of the Black Hills' most beloved tourist attractions, is getting a black eye this week with the news that the place occasionally slaughters the bears and markets the parts.
There's an online story in the Rapid City Journal in which an investigator calls Bear Country a "puppy factory." Sounds more like a farm to us.

Apparently, a big market exists for bear gall bladders in Asian countries. The bile is used in many traditional Chinese medicines. In China, bear farms have been criticized for "milking" the bile from live bears. Animal experts say all species of bears in the world except the giant Panda are threatened by the practice because the farms and preserves routinely must restock from wild animals, even though they claim to breed enough in captivity to allow for the slaughter.