HISTORY IN MINIATURE
Loveland collection showcases decades-long passion for WWII memorabilia
In the 1980’s, Loveland businessman and Marine veteran Frank Ward began collecting figurines and dioramas depicting real-life scenes of World War II and other military conflicts in imaginative and heartbreaking detail.
Over the decades, Ward and his collecting partners Mel and Delores “Dee” Neal amassed an enormous collection, containing thousands of items that can barely be contained in four rooms.
Row upon row of tiny metal soldiers, sailors, airmen, nurses, officers, wounded combatants, horses and more line dozens of shelves in one room, while hundreds of model trucks, jeeps, fire engines and trains line the shelves of another.
And then there are the three dozen handcrafted dioramas, each rendered in meticulous detail.
Many of them were custom made by Andres Flores, a local student who worked for Ward after a fire damaged his collection in 2013.
A talented artist who was studying at Colorado State University, Flores assisted with restoration and then designed his own dioramas to replace items that were lost.
According to Neal, the student spent hundreds of hours painstakingly crafting his scenes, with no detail too small to obsess over.
“It was just amazing the things that he did,” Neal said, pointing to a diorama depicting a destroyed stone bridge. “He put on a plaster board, and then he would take and put a quarter inch plaster of paris on there.
And then when that was dried, he took his Dremel tool, and he would make all of grid for the stones and then paint that whatever color you want.”
Flores worked for Ward for five years, creating several dioramas, including a large scene of a bombed-out apartment building and a scene of a battle near a train station, a design that netted him first place in a CSU student art competition, Neal said.
The collection also contains hundreds of pieces of patriotic and historic artwork, from paintings, to drawings, to photos and more.
Ward died four years ago, so the collection is no longer growing, but Mel and Dee Neal still maintain it with loving care.
On Feb. 25, the extraordinary display will be open to the public between noon and 4 p.m. for a fundraiser to benefit the future Loveland Veterans Plaza.
A donation of any amount will get you in the door.
The future Loveland Veterans Plaza is the vision of a local community of Vietnam War veterans, who wanted a dedicated space for memorials, gatherings and ceremonies.
The centerpiece will be a memorial to Loveland High graduates who served in Vietnam, but local veterans from all conflicts will be recognized and honored at the site.
“This plaza is going to be something different than any other one that you’ll ever see,” said Tony Dumosh, a Desert Storm-era veteran and member of the Veterans Plaza committee.
“It’ll recognize every war era in combat that we were in — Somalia, Granada, Panama. You don’t hear those ever mentioned, but this one will have it.”
The plans got a boost last year when the city of Loveland agreed to donate the land and help with ongoing maintenance costs.
But it stopped short of agreeing to pick up construction costs, so a fundraising effort to build the plaza was launched on Veterans Day.
According to committee member Ron Albers, donations have started to come in for the project, and it has generated substantial interest from local civic organizations, businesses and private donors.
Though still far short of the estimated $1.2 million needed for construction, he and other committee members are optimistic about the coming months.
“We’re talking to service groups, the civic groups,” Albers said.
We’ve been in front of a number of them, we’ve got a good number to go. …The website’s doing well. We’re getting feedback.”
The Ward’s dioramas and military miniatures display is located in the Ward Building at 2114 North Lincoln Avenue.
For more information about the fundraiser or the plaza project, visit Lovelandveteransplaza.org.