Foil: 7 Panel: 1 Column: 3 Line: 84

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Burt Cosgrove is a hanging judge — he hangs vintage U.S. flags, presidential campaign buttons and antique Christmas Seals on the wails of his courtroom and offices.
About a dozen flags fly in Cos-grove's third-floor courtroom at the Bernalillo County Courthouse. It's just a small sampling. He has about 300 flags, some dating from the 1850s.
Cosgrove says relatives from Kansas to California have provided many of them.
"They dust them off and get them out of the attic," he says.
And he keeps an eye out for flags at flea markets and swap meets.
He shows the flags to Boy Scouts and Albuquerque Public Schools students regularly. Some 6th and 7th graders were the latest batch Friday. The judge gives a talk and hands out fact sheets.
The judge also has amassed collections of classic model airplanes and fruit crate labels.
Cosgrove, 44, became interested in planes at a very early age, thanks to his father, a retired Air Force colonel.
"I don't have my first dime, but I have the plastic model plane I bought with it," he says. "I was about 5."
His father, Burt Cosgrove Jr., helped him build his first models — always planes, never cars.
"He was very insistent that my first collection be not only planes but Air Force planes," the judge says. "Not Navy or Army."
Cosgrove also gives those who tour his collection a fact sheet on the model aircraft he acquired from the estate of the late Jim Breitenbach, who worked at Sandia National Laboratories, later taught music in Albuquerque schools and then ran a hobby store until he died in September 1989.
The planes are displayed in a glass case in the jury room adjoining Cosgrove's 2nd Judicial District courtroom in downtown Albuquerque.
Breitenbach began building the collection in 1937. It includes about 90 quarter-inch-to-one-foot
scale models of such vintage World War I planes as the German Albatross D-III, the Sopwith "Baby" seaplane, Bristol Monoplane and F2-B, Westland Wagtail, Vickers Gun Bus and many others.
Cosgrove also displays a few planes of his own making.
He's now building a model of a B-17 bomber to present at a June reunion of his father’s old unit — the 19th Bombardment Group, which flew from Albuquerque to the Philippines just before the start of World War II.
Cosgrove's oldest political button was issued by the 1896 William McKinley campaign. The most recent is a 1972 McGovern-Shriver button. He stopped collecting them after 1972, he says, because people seemed to stop wearing them.
In addition, ho has a small collection of commemorative coins of his own design. He had a commercial mint make about 100 per edition at a cost of $1,000, or $10 apiece.