ORANGE COUNTY VOICES STAR QUALITY : Air Terminal’s Namesake Should Be Fit to Share Billing With John Wayne : Public works: The Board of Supervisors chairman wants to name the new $50-million passenger structure for colleague Thomas F. Riley. But would that make for happy landings?

Eleven years ago, shortly after Orange County Airport had officially been renamed for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a couple dozen other bleary, homeward bound passengers and I watched with delight as a flight attendant exploded into a giggling fit trying to welcome us to John Wayne Airport.

She couldn’t have been more amused if the place had been named for Harpo Marx. To her, it must have seemed like the final approach to the Twilight Zone. An airport named John Wayne? But who cared? After a four-hour flight from Chicago the sight of a normally composed young woman on the verge of giddy tears was a real tonic, and it set off a good-natured round of really awful Duke impersonations among a bunch of pinstripes who until that moment had been grinding away with calculators and Wall Street Journals.

It was fun, in a kind of a loopy, misdirected way, to land at a place named for Rooster Cogburn rather than for some politician or other. Sort of festive. Like being rerouted from, say, Jesse Helms Field to Kermit the Frog International. Made you feel better.

But now there’s a plan afoot that may blunt that happy effect. Don R. Roth, the new chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, wants to name the new $50-million passenger terminal for his fellow supervisor, Thomas F. Riley. I’m against it.

It isn’t that Riley is undeserving. He was, after all, the prime local governmental mover behind the terminal project. It’s just that I think we can do better by the poor passenger from Wichita--who’s running on no sleep, a gristly airline cutlet and a microscopic bag of stale peanuts, and who has a mandate from the boss to sell out the rest of his widgets in Orange County or else--than to shove him off the plane and into a terminal named for yet another unknown (to him) bureaucrat.

The new terminal ought to have a name that suggests flair and elan and there’s no reason that it can’t have its origins in Orange County.

It ought to be named for someone accomplished, fascinating, well-spoken, widely known, mostly honest and possibly gorgeous or funny or both who lives in the county, or who once lived in the county, or once did something hugely memorable in the county.

And just to show the folks in L.A. we’re not the homogenous drudges they think we are (they named the international terminal at LAX for the mayor, for God’s sake!), our new terminal ought to be named for someone whose name most people would never expect to see on an airline terminal in a thousand years.

So, bearing in mind that Laurel and Hardy, Sandy Koufax, the Pope, Elvis, Magic Johnson, Beethoven and the Rev. Louis Sheldon are all pretty much out of the question (no matter what Sheldon says), who looks good?

* Howard Hughes. Great local aviation tie-in: he’s known in Orange County for belly-flopping a souped-up monoplane into a Costa Mesa beet field.

* Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan. Still living in the county, he took off from New York in 1938 intending to fly to Long Beach and ended up in Ireland.

* Bing Crosby. Used to make a point, on his way to Del Mar, of getting off the train when it stopped in San Juan Capistrano to grab a couple of quick tacos at the Rios family’s trackside stand.

* Henry Segerstrom. Because we’re starting to run out of things to put his name on.

* Kelly McGillis. Because she’s from Newport Beach, because she has an aeronautical connection (“Top Gun”) and, well, just because.

* Steve Martin. A Garden Grove boy. Your luggage went to Cleveland? Well, excuuuuuuuse me!

* Richard M. Nixon. OK, so he doesn’t really meet all the criteria. But he’d be good for another round of really bad impersonations on the plane.

* Harriet Nelson. Lives in Laguna Beach. And can you think of a better way to give an airline terminal a homey feel than to put Ozzie’s wife’s name on it?

* George Burns and Gracie Allen. Once had a home on the Balboa Peninsula. A great pick because it would oblige George to come down here and tell a few jokes at the dedication, which alone would make the choice worthwhile.

You get the idea. Of course, I have a personal favorite. She meets every one of the requirements in the sixth paragraph, plus her name on the terminal building would be an almost poetic counterpoint to John Wayne’s.

Plus her picture (a really big one) inside the terminal would look a lot more hospitable to a few million weary travelers than Riley’s would.

Riley can have his name on a park or an equestrian statue or something. But the lettering on the new terminal ought to read “Michelle Pfeiffer International.”