Word: autographing
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What is the market price of admiration? It can't be intimacy that ballplayers are peddling for $5, $8 and $12 a signature to children lined up at autograph marts. Almost any weekend of the year in school halls and shopping malls, casino hotels and churches, heroes are hired to lure hobbyists to baseball-card shows where memories are for sale...
Icons as regal as Ernie Banks ($12 an autograph), Willie Mays ($12) and Joe DiMaggio ($30) are involved. "It's the free-enterprise system," says ex- Oriole pitcher Jim Palmer, who is capable of modeling underpants on billboards without blushing and is available to sign anyone's shorts for $10. Mostly they sign bubble-gum cards and glossy pictures...
Genuine celebs will mingle with the fans of Hollywood Boulevard each day (Cyd Charisse this week). But the basic idea of Disney-MGM is that the visitor is the star. Bobby-soxed employees clamor for your autograph, demand to be photographed with your family of four (who have paid about $110 for a day at the park). In the SuperStar Television show, you guest-star in ingeniously integrated scenes from I Love Lucy, Today, The Ed Sullivan Show or General Hospital. On the 90-min. Studio Tour you don a yellow slicker and become skipper of the good ship Miss...
...kids tossed their books and balls over the top. After signing, the players threw the objects back over the fence, in one of Viola's favorite spring rituals. "I was a shy kid," remembers the Long Island native, "so I had my mom ask for Rick Barry's autograph at a Nets game once. He refused. So I take as much time as I can signing autographs. The kids take it as a challenge. I'm easy to get, but some guys are tough...
Three weeks ago, a little girl asked MacDonald for his autograph, pinched his cheeks, and told him he is "cute...