HIGHLAND HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER GLEN FRAKES (CENTER) WORKS WITH HIS STUDENTS EARLIER THIS MONTH TO BUILD A SECOND DIORAMA ABOUT THE LAST CIVIL WAR BATTLE FOUGHT IN TEXAS. (Photo by Tim Hacker/Tribune)
Glen Frakes was done with building historical dioramas, those miniature models of famous battles and other moments of our past. Frakes, a history teacher at Gilbert’s Highland High School, has been passionate about teaching his students how to do these hands-on projects going back three decades. But planning and building dioramas takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. Frakes had to raise private money to fund each project, and usually had to recruit extra volunteer help (or do the work himself) for the most complex elements that students weren’t prepared to handle. Approaching retirement age, Frakes was ready to step away from the crafting table.
So the Battle of Palmito Ranch (previously referred to as Palmetto Ranch) was supposed to be his last, big adventure, crafted on demand for the Texas military museum in Austin that had given Frakes his start in making dioramas for public display and had remained his biggest supporter over the years.
Frakes clearly loved the three years he worked with his classes in building that Civil War diorama. But the project became a nightmare after it was delivered in August 2007. A new museum curator said he couldn’t tolerate the diorama’s alleged historical inaccuracies, and he essentially ripped it apart. Frakes and his many supporters begged for the diorama pieces to be returned so it could be restored. Instead, the museum curator built a smaller version more to his liking under orders from Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
One of the twists to this story was when a separate private military museum in Texas offered to pay the cost of returning the broken diorama to Gilbert for restoration, and then put it on display in its Fort Worth facility. When that was rejected, the second museum offered $25,000 to pay for the supplies to build another diorama.
It took a while, but Frakes finally agree to pick up his tools one more time. The teacher told me by phone last week that he wants his last memories of diorama-crafting to be positive and uplifting, not the bitter dregs from last year’s futile efforts. Frakes says he won’t have to spend three years on this one, as so many students and adult volunteers are joining the effort that the new diorama should be done within months.
And it probably will be better, as Frakes has continued to research the underlying subject and he has tweaked the design to reflect additional information he has learned (such as changing the name of where the Civil War battle took place).
But the new diorama will be missing one touch, a beautiful replica steamboat. The man who hand-crafted that feature for the first diorama has died, and I can’t imagine the original museum will do the decent thing and return the steamboat to Frakes for the new version.
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