Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions, and Strategies of Early Western Business Leaders. This item is unavailable.Out Where the West Begins: Profiles, Visions, and Strategies of Early Western Business Leaders

In this remarkable tale of courage, historian Dawn Trimble Bunyak recounts the experiences of her uncle, Lawrence Pifer, a technical sergeant who survived fourteen months of internment as a prisoner of war in World War II Nazi Germany.A radio operator and ball turret gunner on the American B-17 bomber Slightly Dangerous, Pifer was shot down during a raid on March 4, 1944. As he parachuted from the plummeting plane, Pifer witnessed the deaths of two of his fellow crewmembers. Captured by Nazi soldiers and taken to a series of German Stalag Luft camps, Pifer and other servicemen-mostly in their teens and twenties-endured torture, starvation, disease, and forced marches. When British forces liberated Pifer's group, he pushed his POW experiences deep into the recesses of his mind, not to recall them in detail for decades.Years later, a POW group at a Veterans Administration hospital helped Pifer realize that he was ready to tell his story. After forty hours of interviews with Pifer, Dawn Trimble Bunyak retells the enthralling story of an average enlisted man's struggle to survive in the face of hopelessness, with only his strong faith and pride in country to sustain him.In his foreword, historian Arnold Krammer shows how popular views of the prisoner-of-war experience have changed dramatically over time yet how rare are such first-person accounts as Pifer's. Enhanced by numerous photographs and maps and an appendix of prisoners' poetry, Our Last Mission is one of only a few oral histories that details the daily experiences of one of the 94,000 American POWs in Europe during World War II.

Philip F. Anschutz is owner of The Anschutz Corporation, Denver, Colorado, whose major business interests are in communications, transportation, natural and renewable resources, real estate, lodging, and entertainment. A native of Kansas, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1961 with a degree in business. He started The Anschutz Corporation in 1965. He has served on boards and committees of various charitable, civic, industry, and financial organizations. Among Mr. Anschutz's personal interests is the collecting of paintings of the early American West.

William J. Convery, retired as Colorado State Historian and Director of Exhibits and Interpretation for History Colorado, teaches history at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Thomas J. Noel is Professor of History and Director of Public History, Preservation, and Colorado Studies at University of Colorado Denver. He appears regularly on Denver's Channel 9 (NBC) as "Dr. Colorado," writes a Sunday Denver Post column, and is the author or coauthor of more than 40 books, including Colorado: A History of the Centennial State (coauthored with Carl Abbott and Steve Leonard) and Colorado: A Liquid History and Tavern Guide to the Highest State.