Big Burt, that's a cool story about the old paino. I wish I could luck into something like that. I wonder if there were any old painos stashed away in the old buildings in Deadwood before its current gambling "renaissance" and what had fallen or had been stashed in them? If those old painos could talk...

Being from Cali and mentioning that the paino was made out of black walnut, you might appreciate this fact. All the English walnuts growing nuts in the Central Valley are grafted onto black walnut root stock. When driving around there, its sort of strange seeing the two different colored barks and many times the "stump" may be wider than than the main trunk of the tree. I guess there is a fungus or something in the soil that the English walnut is plagued by but the native black walnut not. There are a few black walnut nurseies as well that we saw drving around there in the trip I did in the mid-2000s providing the root stock.