An award-winning pop singer and a former president who may be best known as the namesake of a rest stop on the Turnpike headline the New Jersey's Hall of Fame's Class of 2013.

 

Whitney Houston & Dionne Warwick
Whitney Houston (L) and Dionne Warwick perform onstage at the 2011 Pre-GRAMMY Gala and Salute To Industry Icons Honoring David Geffen (Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
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Apollo 11 astronaut and inductee Buzz Aldrin was on hand when the 16-member class was announced Monday at a news conference at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. The new members will be formally inducted during an Oct. 21 ceremony at the Izod Center in East Rutherford.

The new hall members are singers Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick and Celia Cruz; actors Alan Alda and Joe Piscopo; Super Bowl-winning New York Giants coach Bill Parcells; President Grover Cleveland; American revolution activist Thomas Paine; filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy Blache; sculptor J. Seward Johnson, Jr.; former Gov. Tom Kean; make-up tycoon Bobbi Brown; inventor and radio & TV pioneer David Sarnoff; philanthropist Ray Chambers; track Olympian Joetta Clark Diggs and world heavyweight boxing champion Jersey Joe Walcott.

Besides announcing the new members, hall officials also unveiled a mobile museum that will show the way inductees have changed the state and the world. It features a multimedia exhibition that includes images, artifacts, film, and interactive elements

The web-based New Jersey's Hall of Fame doesn't have a permanent home to call its own, so officials turned to architect and inductee Michael Graves to design the mobile museum. Hall of Fame Foundation Board chairman-emeritus John Keegan calls it a "field trip on wheels."

The New Jersey Hall of Fame has operated online since 2008. Among its members are Toni Morrison, Buzz Aldrin, Bruce Springsteen, Yogi Berra, John Travolta and Queen Latifah.

Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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