SISSETON--This weekend and next should be the best time to se the blazing reds, oranges, and yellows in the hollows near Sisseton. Sumacs are about at their reddest. The sugar maples are red-orange. The ash and cottonwoods are changing to yellows and browns.

'Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie, there's only the expedient exaggeration. You ought to know that!" -- Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, protagonist in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) The National Park Service would have done well to have reached the same conclusion before it dealt with Alfred Hitchcock, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the world of movie-making! Plenty of "expedient exaggerations" surrounded the filming of scenes for Hitchcock's acclaimed thriller North by Northwest at Mount Rushmore in 1958. While the controversy the Mount Rushmore scenes caused appears humorous today, it was, at the time, a serious matter for the officials of the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior and for South Dakota's United States senator Karl E. Mundt.

I recently read Ido Dissentshik's essay, "Night in a Sealed Room" {op-ed, Jan. 26}. The night he and his family spent in their sealed room during the Scud attack on Tel Aviv must have been terrifying. As a family man like him, I can't imagine my 1-year-old and wife having to endure the dangers of missiles and poison gas.

Americans, who are used to laws, codes, judicial decision, and regulations on almost every aspect of life, may find it hard to comprehend, but the People's Republic of China did not have a comprehensive code of substantive or procedural criminal procedure until 1979.

Much has been written concerning the desperate flight of the Northern Cheyenne in 1878 from their reservation in Indian territory, through western Kansas and Nebraska, and their return to their ancestral hunting grounds. The problems leading to the Cheyenne outbreak, the trek through miles of hostile territory, the commission of murders in Kansas, and the Cheyennes' capture and re-escape from Fort Robinson, Neb., have been studied at length in various books and articles such as Marie Sandoz' Cheyenne Autumn.

On this date, the New Jersey Wing of the Civil Air Patrol located the fatal wreckage of a Beechcraft Travelair near a wildlife refuge near Millville, N.J. The dead were identified by Millville Hospital as Roger King, 53 years old, the pilot, and his wife, Patricia, 51, of Millville.

On this date in 1927, Special Agent Charles Bintliff of the ATF and Agent Charles Halpin of the IRS were murdered near Redfield while investigating a boolegger. An excerpt from the S.D. Fraternal Order of Police LEO Memorial: Special Agent Charles Bintliff - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives: Friday, May 13, 1927.