Week in Review : MISCELLANY/ NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

It has been seven months since Gregory Ysais Jr. of Mission Viejo tore a branch from a bush in Caspers Wilderness Park and drove off a mountain lion that would surely have killed the 5-year-old girl it had in its jaws.

Since then the girl, Laura Michele Small of Huntington Beach, her parents and scores of letter writers and callers have thanked Ysais, and last week the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission added its appreciation.

The commission, headquartered in Pittsburgh, named Ysais as one of 19 heroes it chose to honor with a $2,500 cash gift and a medal. They will be arriving in the mail soon. “That’s OK with me,” Ysais said after learning the news. “I’m not much for speeches.”

Ysais, a 36-year-old electronics technician, said the money would probably go to finance his family’s Christmas this year.

Orange County will celebrate its 100th birthday in 1989, and its congressional delegation thinks having a Navy fighting ship named after the area would be a nice centennial gift.

“We think it appropriate that there should be a ship named for this county,” U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson said in Santa Ana. “This is, after all, a county that has become synonymous with unabashed patriotism.”

The Navy’s unofficial reaction? Yes, no and maybe.

Wilson said he expects Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. to notify him that the county has been placed on a waiting list of names for new vessels. The area, Wilson said, deserves the honor because it has been a good host to Navy installations: Marine Corps air stations at El Toro and Tustin and a Naval weapons depot in Seal Beach.

A spokesman for Lehman, however, at first said there is virtually no chance of a ship being named after Orange County, then said there is a “faint possibility,” then said the proposal is “feasible” and “a good idea.”

If such a thing comes to pass, the USS Orange County won’t exactly be in the same class as the battleships New Jersey and Missouri. More than likely it would be an amphibious assault ship of the kind that carries Marines and their equipment during landing operations.

Edward J. Quilligan has a lofty goal: to make the UC Irvine College of Medicine “the No. 1 medical school in the United States.” And he’ll get his chance to do that if his nomination as the new dean of the school is approved by the UC Board of Regents in January.

The 61-year-old Quilligan, who is currently chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology department at UC Davis and had been a member of the UC Irvine faculty from 1980 to 1983, was characterized as “a distinguished physician and accomplished administrator” by UC Irvine Chancellor Jack Peltason.

The UC Irvine medical school has been headed by an interim dean since January, 1985, when Dr. Stanley van den Noort was not reappointed to his post, an action widely attributed to his support for an on-campus hospital affiliated with the medical school.

Calling the young mother’s conduct “the grossest of negligence,” a Municipal Court judge has ordered Beverly Jean Ernst to stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges in the deaths of her babies.

Ernst’s twins, Adam and Ashley, were left in her car from 7 a.m. to shortly past noon July 20, while she and a boyfriend slept inside a nearby janitorial supply shop. Health officials estimated that noontime temperatures inside the car could have been as high as 120 degrees.

Ernst’s attorney claimed that she took a nap inside the shop after her boyfriend, Scott Morrow, agreed to watch the children for her, and then discovered when she awoke that he had fallen asleep, too.

But at the end of Ernst’s six-day preliminary hearing last week, Municipal Judge Dan C. Dutcher said there was no evidence that Morrow had promised to watch the children.

While saying he was sympathetic to Ernst and that she will “regret for the rest of her life” what happened, Dutcher said he “couldn’t sit here in good conscience and say that what she did doesn’t amount to culpable negligence.”

He ordered her to stand trial on two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of felony child endangerment.

Two Dana Point schoolteachers have pleaded guilty to hiring a band of mercenaries to firebomb cars of former employees to end a business dispute.

Charlotte Ruth Wyckoff, 52, and Elizabeth Leta Hamilton, 39, roommates who ran a chain of private schools in Orange and San Bernardino counties, agreed to plead guilty to two of 10 federal charges. If convicted of all counts, the women would have faced a maximum of 100 years in prison. But under the plea bargain, each now faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and up to $375,000 in fines.

The pleas were entered in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, one day before the women were to have gone to trial.