Hall of Fame choices fall short of the mark

Look, Willie Mays was the greatest ballplayer maybe ever. Elizabeth Taylor was a stunning movie actress. And a lot of people thought Milton Berle was hilarious.

But as historical figures of California, they hardly match up to “the Big Four” who built the western leg of the transcontinental railroad, or to the reform Gov. Hiram Johnson or even to the man who gave us blue jeans, Levi Strauss.

Or industrialist Henry J. Kaiser or Gov. Pat Brown.

Yet Mays, Taylor and Berle were chosen by First Lady Maria Shriver and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to be among the second group of inductees into their California Hall of Fame. You’ve also got to wonder about their selections of winemaker Robert Mondavi and actress Rita Moreno.

I even question the inclusion of Dr. Jonas Salk, only because it was in Pennsylvania that the New York-born scientist developed his polio vaccine, years before establishing an institute for biological studies in San Diego.

But Shriver and Schwarzenegger did get it right on these picks:

Ansel Adams, the wilderness photographer; Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computers; Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier; John Steinbeck, whose “Grapes of Wrath” arguably is the most famous novel ever set in California; Earl Warren, our only thrice-elected governor and a U.S. Supreme Court chief justice; Tiger Woods, golf’s ambassador to a diversified society; and film icon John Wayne. All seven, incidentally, were born and/or grew up in California.

The 13 honorees will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame on Wednesday night at the state history museum, two blocks from the Capitol. Displays will go up for a year, including Adams’ camera, Moreno’s Oscar for “West Side Story,” Robinson’s civil rights advocacy letter to President Eisenhower, Salk’s lab coat, Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” manuscript, Warren’s Supreme Court robe and Wayne’s saddle and boots.

Sounds worth a visit -- $7.50 for adults, $5 for kids, student groups $3 each -- and that’s the main idea of this Hall of Fame. It’s not a true Hall of Fame, as in baseball, when only the greatest players, the tallest giants of history, are selected. Shriver’s goal was to pump life into a moribund museum. And to do that, she needed some live honorees -- people like Jobs and Woods -- to whom young people could relate and who could draw TV cameras by walking a Hollywood-style red carpet.

It’s starting to work. Museum attendance this year is projected to be 56,000, a paltry number, but still a big jump from the 40,000 when Schwarzenegger took office. Income has more than tripled to over $3 million.

“The buzz is strong and growing,” says museum Deputy Director John O’Connor.

I just wish they had called it something besides a Hall of Fame. Maybe the first family’s Preferred Prominent People.

My problem, for example, with the selection of Alabama-born Mays is that he already was a baseball great with the New York Giants before ever coming to California, and he came here only because his team moved to San Francisco.

If the selectors had wanted another ballplayer besides Robinson, they should have picked Joe DiMaggio. He’s a Bay Area product whose name is synonymous with San Francisco’s Fishermen’s Wharf and whose two brothers also played in the big leagues.

They could have made it interesting and placed Joltin’ Joe’s display right up there on the museum wall next to his beloved wife, Marilyn Monroe. She deserves space in the hall over both Taylor and Moreno. Monroe’s is the quintessential Hollywood story: Started from nothing, bounced around L.A. foster homes and orphanages and was discovered by a photographer while working in a Southern California aircraft plant during World War II.

Comedian Berle apparently made the cut because he encouraged Schwarzenegger early in his career. The rationale for “Uncle Miltie’s” selection is that his 1950s TV show helped unify the nation because everybody watched it. Or something like that. So, what about Red Skelton? (No, I’m not related and am not serious.)

Rather than vintner Mondavi, how about Oakland industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, whose World War II shipyards turned out one vessel a day and who also pioneered HMOs?

Ah, yes, the answer is they want people who are alive. Kaiser, Monroe and DiMaggio aren’t.

Here’s a live writer: Joan Didion, 72, a Sacramento native who is an unexcelled chronicler of California’s soul. It doesn’t get much better than her writing about the approaching Santa Ana winds -- “The baby frets. The maid sulks.” -- and quoting author Raymond Chandler: “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

Chandler is long dead, but put him in the hall, too, for his stylistic L.A. crime novels in the 1940s and ‘50s.

This year’s selections are a marked improvement over last year’s. Among that inaugural group, I’d have chosen only Ronald Reagan, farm union leader Cesar Chavez and naturalist John Muir.

The rest were actor Clint Eastwood, writer Alice Walker, architect Frank Gehry, Walt Disney, aviator Amelia Earhart, AIDs researcher David Ho, tennis star Billie Jean King, astronaut Sally Ride and the Hearst and Packard families.

I’d have preferred to honor these giants:

Amadeo Peter Giannini, who founded the Bank of America, was the first to lend to the working stiff and bankrolled the movie industry; the railroad pioneers -- Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins -- who opened the continent; Gov. Johnson, who gave us the initiative, referendum and recall and crushed monopolies; Gov. Pat Brown, builder and visionary whom Schwarzenegger has tried to emulate; the gold rush guys, John Sutter and James Marshall; and Ishi, the last Native American to survive in the wild.

“Those people will eventually make it,” predicts California historian Kevin Starr, who advises the governor and first lady on their picks.

Until they do, it really shouldn’t be called a California Hall of Fame.

george.skelton@latimes.com