IF YOU GO

What: Reds Hall of Fame and Museum When: Opens today after a 9 a.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony. Where: West of the Great American Ball Park, 100 Main St. Admission prices, non-game days: $8, adult; $6, seniors 55 and over and groups of 25 or more; $5, youth 12 and under; $2, school groups; free, museum members, Reds employees and families. Admission prices, game days: $5, adult/youth with game ticket. Memberships available. Hours of operation: Offseason hours,10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon- 6 p.m. Sundays. Same hours on non-game days during the baseball season. For Monday through Saturday day games, 11:15 a.m.-7 p.m. For Sunday day games, 11:15 a.m.-6 p.m. Only fans with game tickets will be allowed to enter on game days. For Monday-Saturday night games, the hall will be open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and 5:45 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Only fans with game tickets can enter after 5:45 p.m. Information: (513) 765-7576

Not yet, anyway.

One of the last times anyone attempted to document all the halls of fame in the United States - in a 1997 book by Victor J. Danilov titled Hall of Fame Museums: A Reference Guide - there were 244 halls of fame in the United States, including eight in Ohio and one in Kentucky.

Today, there are at least 30 halls of fame in Ohio devoted to subjects as varied as football, polka, barbering, motorcycling, accounting, trapshooting and White Castle hamburgers. Kentucky also has a handful, including the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum that opened in Renfro Valley in 2002. And that's not counting the athletic halls of fame honoring college and high school students, such as the 29-year-old Buddy LaRosa's Sports Hall of Fame for high school athletes.

Halls of fame are growing so popular that they may need their own hall of fame some day, and just about anyone connected with one has an theory about why.

"We live in a society that watches so many people fall off their pedestals," says David Klingshirn, a pharmacist who founded the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in Cincinnati in 1996. "People are really hungry for something positive, for role models. And people need to be recognized for their achievements."

Anyone with enough vision, creativity and willingness to go without sleep, as Klingshirn puts it, can start a hall of fame. More than a century after the first American hall, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, was founded in 1900, no organization has established requirements for halls of fame, although most have a formal nomination and induction process. An actual hall isn't even necessary; many halls consist simply of a list someone maintains or a Web site.

That's the case of the Accounting Hall of Fame at Ohio State University. Its members are listed on a Web site and on a few plaques on the wall of the Department of Accounting floor of the Fisher College of Business, says Daniel Jensen, an emeritus professor of accounting.

Are they halls of fame?

Think you can tell a real hall of fame from a fake one? Check the halls you think are legit. (And no looking on the Internet!)  O Celebrity Lingerie Hall of Fame  O Christian Hall of Fame  O International Clown Hall of Fame  O Cockroach Hall of Fame  O Cowgirl Hall of Fame  O Quilters Hall of Fame  O Robot Hall of Fame  O Striptease Hall of Fame  O Taxidermy Hall of Fame  O Cukulele Hall of Fame Answers, below

The Accounting Hall of Fame was founded in 1950, a time when the university was holding national accounting conferences, Jensen says. The founders modeled the hall after sports halls of fame that were cropping up around that time.

"It made sense to people at the time," Jensen says. "And it's taken very seriously by people who get in."

White Castle Hall

Columbus-based White Castle Craver's Hall of Fame exists only on the fast food chain's Web site, where you can find inductees' stories of, say, how they met their significant others over Slyders (what White Castle calls its burgers).

On the more serious side of the hall of fame spectrum, is the Columbus-based Ohio Women's Hall of Fame.

Shannon Carter, the founder of Crayons to Computers, a free store for teachers, was inducted last year after being nominated by a family friend.

She says she hadn't known the hall existed before that, and says she was honored to receive an award presented by Gov. Bob Taft and wife Hope and to meet the other inductees. Only a few people know she received the award, she says, and she prefers to give most of the credit to her organization.

"You're queen for a day, and then it's over and you go back to work," she says.

The Ohio Women's Hall of Fame's physical presence is small, consisting of a permanent display on South Front Street in Columbus and regional displays around the state.

Barber hall of fame

In a similar vein, the Barbering Hall of Fame - which honors 36 barbers, clipper manufacturers, textbook editors and others - occupies a wing of the by-appointment-only Barber Museum in Canal Winchester.

It's the museum itself that has attracted international media attention. Curator, retired barber and Hall of Famer Ed Jeffers says it now includes 74 wooden barber poles, 545 shaving mugs and 400 straight razors, including an 8-foot-long razor used for a promotion in 1833.

Other museums use halls of fame to enhance their exhibits. The Motorcycle Heritage Museum added a hall of fame and changed its name to the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum after deciding that it would attract more media and tourist attention that way.

Mark Mederski, executive director of the Pickerington museum, says the people that halls of fame showcase make otherwise static historical objects come alive.

"The people are probably 80 to 90 percent of what the story is," he says. "A 1987 Harley-Davidson becomes a whole different piece of equipment when you find out somebody rode it from the northern reaches of North America to the southern reaches of South America."

So far, the American Classical Music Hall of Fame has attracted attention for its inductions of noted singers, musicians, composers, conductors and teachers and not so much for its temporary home on Fourth Street downtown. It features photos and biographies of the inductees, listening stations and a classical music timeline.

But Klingshirn, the founder, says the hall hopes in the next few months to announce a permanent home near the Music Hall. He'd like to see rotating exhibits in the new location.

And there could be more hall of fame news in the region later this year.

State senators approved the establishment of an Ohio African-American Hall of Fame in June, and the House is scheduled to take up the matter this fall.

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E-mail lbishop@enquirer.com