THIS HALL GLORIFIES FAME ITSELF, FROM QUILTS TO QUACKS.

Byline: James O. Clifford Associated Press 

Fame may be fleeting, but Americans can't get enough of it. There seems to be a hall of fame for everything. Now there's one for fame itself: The Hall of Fame Hall of Fame.

Halls of fame from one end of the nation to the other contributed to the new hall that spotlights the nation's adulation of subjects ranging from the hot dog to outer space.

The items were gathered and put in the Center for the Arts at the Yerba Buena Center for a three-month run that opened recently.

The exhibits include a Pink Floyd stage set from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The set, based on Roger Waters' performance of ``The Wall'' in Berlin, is a huge balloon that looms down and screams away, resembling something out of a Macy's parade.

The Floyd display shares a room with a 1923 Duesenberg Model A Sedan from the Automotive Hall of Fame in Midland, Mich. There's also a 1933 Kamp Car on loan from the RV-MH Heritage Foundation Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Ind., which is dedicated to recreational vehicles and mobile homes.

The other rooms contain displays that take up far less space, but still manage to convey the peculiar American passion for honoring just about every field of endeavor.

A hall of fame is a ``grass-roots museum that reflects the passions, concerns and beliefs of 20th century America,'' said Renny Pritikin, the center artistic director who corralled the exhibits. Pritikin calls the halls ``walk-in textbooks narrating an alternative American cultural history.''

According to Pritikin, such museums started to appear in the 1930s, proliferated and today number almost 200. The exhibition could house only a quarter of them.

``We found out there were a lot of sports halls of fame,'' he said. ``So we had to limit those so they didn't overwhelm the exhibit.''

True, the show has lots of sports items, but many are so unusual they are bound to interest even the most jaded sports fan. How about Bob Lanier's size 22 basketball shoe, on loan from the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.? From the Little League Baseball Museum in Williamsport, Pa., we learn that writer George Will, Dan Quayle, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tom Selleck and Bill Bradley all played in the Little League World Series.

But it's lesser heralded fields that steal the show.

Quilt makers have a hall of fame. So do fiddlers, cowgirls and clowns. Even quacks. The Quackery Hall of Fame in Minneapolis contributed several items, including a Spectrochome of the 1930s that promised to cure disease by shining colored lights on the naked body, providing the patient stood in front of the device after midnight.

Size presented problems for some halls of fame, Pritikin said. Some were so small they couldn't lend anything, he said.

``All the Hall of Fame of Famous Indians has are these huge blocks of stone with portrait busts that were too heavy to ship,'' he said.