Architect Frank Gehry, writer Alice Walker and actor Clint Eastwood were to be inducted Wednesday night into the new California Hall of Fame, which will honor achievements ranging from the arts to politics, science, entertainment and sports.
Other honorees included tennis champion Billie Jean King, astronaut Sally Ride and AIDS researcher David Ho. Posthumous awards were to go to Ronald Reagan, Cesar Chavez, Walt Disney, the aviator Amelia Earhart and the naturalist John Muir. The Hearst and Packard families were also to be honored.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger selected the honorees based on recommendations from a committee. He and First Lady Maria Shriver, who conceived the state hall of fame idea, were expected to attend the event at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in downtown Sacramento.
All the living inductees were scheduled to be present, along with members of the Reagan, Chavez, Disney, Earhart and Muir families.
After Wednesday’s ceremony, the museum will reopen to the public with the new hall of fame exhibit. It includes a piece of the Berlin Wall, in honor of the role Reagan played in bringing it down when the Cold War ended.
The flight suit Earhart wore on her solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1932 will also be on display, along with the wooden tennis racket King used to win her sixth singles title at Wimbledon in 1975.
Visitors will also be able to see the letter President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Muir before a camping trip to Yosemite the men took. The trip persuaded Roosevelt to make Yosemite a national park.
Other artifacts include Gehry’s original sketches for the Walt Disney Concert Hall he designed in Los Angeles, memorabilia from Eastwood’s film career and Hewlett Packard’s first personal computer from 1980.
Copyright © 2024 by Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be republished, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.