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Like the mountain to Mohammed, Madison Square Garden is coming to the Town of Springfield. But all the prophecies are clouded. As the rural town of 1,350 people – 31 per square mile – debates how much development it ways, Don Simpson, senior vice president, business development, for MSG Entertainment, will be outlining plans for a three-day music festival proposed for 1,000 acres near East Springfield at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 4, at the Community Center, the former school in Springfield Center. “We are very excited about the possibility of holding our proposed Arts and Music Festival in the Town of Springfield,” according to a statement MSG Entertainment issued Wednesday, May 28. “We are working closely with the town Planning Board and appropriate town representatives to follow the correct process to receive all necessary approvals on a timely basis.” While saying things are still “very preliminary,” MSG Entertainment spokesperson Mikyl Cordoba said Simpson plans to lay out for the public all the plans to date. Supervisor Tom Armstrong announced the meeting at a Thursday, May 22, public hearing – 100 people packed the meeting room – on a proposed moratorium that would delay any major construction in the town for nine months, until efforts to develop a Comprehensive Master Plan for development can be completed. The day after the public meeting, MSG Entertainment plans to present its plans to the town Planning Board, and the town board isn’t scheduled to act on the moratorium until the following Monday, June 9. Armstrong said he’s unsure whether, by submitting its application before the moratorium is officially adopted, MSG Entertainment will be able to move forward regardless. He isn’t even sure, he said, that the moratorium will be approved at all. He and Councilman Rick Morris have opposed it; Councilmen Dan Rosen and Bill Elsey support it, and Richard Rathbun could go either way.  It was a dizzying day in the race for Otsego County judge. While John Lambert, the Cooperstown Republican, was announcing his candidacy on the county courthouse steps, Jill Ghaleb, the Richfield Springs Democrat, was in a Senate confirmation hearing in Albany. By mid-afternoon, after the 70-some supporters who gathered on the courthouse lawn to cheer Lambert had dispersed, the state Senate acted, confirming Ghaleb as county judge, filling the vacancy left when Michael V. Coccoma was elevated to state Supreme Court at the first of the year. The appointment is until the election. The new judge said she was directed to contact the state Office of Court Administration for the Sixth District, which would schedule her swearing-in. “I’m so pleased, I am,” said Ghaleb, a native of Calcutta whose parents brought her to Utica as a baby. Lambert – the two candidates live within three blocks of each other, he on River, she on Lake – was born locally and returned to practice law after graduating from Hartwick College and the New England School of Law. His father, Paul, is a retired CCS superintendent of schools. “My roots are deep, my commitment is strong,” he told a Republican crowd that included county Rep. Jim Johnson, Mayor Carol B. Waller, and trustees Eric Hage and Neil Weiller. A partner in the firm of Lambert & Trossett, as well as Cooperstown village attorney, Lambert reflected fondly on the many hours he’s spent in the courthouse that was his backdrop. He was accompanied by wife Katie and their three children, Jack, 6, Anna, 4, and Charlie, who clambered up and down the steps in 2-year-old style during the proceeding. “If elected your judge,” Lambert said, “you can be assured that you will have a family man in your family court.” Ghaleb, a graduate of New York University School of Law, returned home and practiced in Utica. On marrying Hany Ghaleb, a dentist with a practice in Richfield Springs, she moved to Otsego County in the 1990s and has been active in family court matters. The county judge oversees criminal, family and surrogate courts. County GOP chair Sheila Ross, who was at the Lambert announcement, said three of the four GOP candidates who sought the Republican County Committee’s endorsement – it went to Lambert by a sizeable margin – have pledged not to mount a primary. In 1971, Richard Hanna’s father went to work one morning as usual, had a heart attack and never returned. Hanna, who today operates a Utica-area construction company from his home on Otsego Lake, uses the word “petrified” to describe how he felt. A few days later, the bank called to ask, “How do you want to handle the bankruptcy?” Hanna, who was finishing up at Whitesboro High School, didn’t know what the word meant. His father, a carpenter (and former Marine during World War II), had been developing Country Village, a trailer park near Barneveld, at the time of his death. The family – Hanna, his mother and two sisters – was in debt, his father hadn’t had insurance, but bankruptcy didn’t appeal to Hanna. Delaying college, he went to work. Within three years he had the trailer park “stabilized,” and headed off to Reed College in Oregon, graduating with a B.A. in international economics, with honors. At 28, he was back home and “flat broke.” But that was good. Simply bring broke was an improvement over being in debt. His one asset was an old backhoe, so Hanna became available to anyone who might need a backhoe for any purpose – laying a sewer line, digging a foundation “I ran scared, all the time,” the Republican remembered during an interview the other day a week after announcing he plans to challenge freshman U.S. Rep. Michael Arcuri, D-24. One thing led to another. A single backhoe became Hanna Construction, and small housing developments became multi-million-dollar commercial and municipal projects. His favorites have been sports-related – Utica College’s Astroturf field, Duffy Baseball Field in Watertown, one-time home of the NY-Penn League’s Pirates. And through this time, he’s been a 25-year member of the Operating Engineers’ Local 545, Syracuse. An unlikely Congressional candidate, you might think. After all, Sherwood Boehlert, the Republican who represented the 24th, spent his whole career in government and politics. Arcuri was Oneida County district attorney for a dozen years before winning the 24th. Plus, Hanna’s never held elective office. But when political consultant Vince Casale of Herkimer (and son of Cooperstown’s Tony Casale) describes what the GOP is looking for this year, Hanna fits: a non-traditional candidate, someone who’s flourished in private industry or built a business. Someone who’s focused on traditional Republican tenets like lower taxes and less government, who preferably doesn’t take a hard line on social issues. When Hanna was 30 – he didn’t marry until he was 51; he and wife Kim have a 1-year-old son – he dated a young woman we’ll call Annie. “She had four kids, no money, no prospects, hardworking. She had two jobs,” said Hanna. She couldn’t gain weight, period, since she couldn’t afford to buy new clothes; she was still wearing her wardrobe from high school. Annie had a washer in the basement, but she didn’t have a dryer. The couple’s idea of a date was hanging the wash on a clothesline. Eventually, Richard splurged; he had a credit card, so he bought Annie a dryer. As time went on, he reflected on Annie’s situation, and how she is like a lot of women. Women who could get an associate’s degree, if only they could afford a babysitter. Women who could meet payments on a car or a house, if only they could afford the downpayment. So he established Annie’s Fund, administered by the Women’s Fund of Herkimer & Oneida Counties, which so far has given 128 grants to women who find themselves in these Catch-22 quandaries. He’s been involved in numerous non-profits and charitable entities, from the Utica public library to the Friends of Bassett, from the East Utica Youth Ministry to hospice. He received the Herkimer-Oneida Community Foundation’s coveted Rosamond Childs Award for Community Philanthropy. And the Jewish Community Federation declared him an “honorary Jew.” There’s much more. Hanna – he’s the first candidate for Congress from the Cooperstown area since 1992, when Democrat Paula DiPerna challenged Boehlert – was interviewed for more than an hour the other day at a picnic table at Westville Airport. An avid flyer, he’d bought the airport, added a paved tarmac and a new long hangar, then sold it at a loss; small airports just aren’t money makers, he mused. On the issues: • The economy? “Government doesn’t create jobs. It doesn’t create opportunity. It creates the climate for them. New York State has failed to create that climate.” • Energy? “We need to promote nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides 80 percent of France’s energy needs.” • Government regulation? “Government needs to keep the ugly and bumpy edges of capitalism smooth. Business needs to be fair, accessible, honest and transparent.” • Iraq? “Should we have gone there? No. Should we leave? No. We have accepted the responsibility for the lives of millions of people.” He’s strolling across the lawn now, heading toward a hangar that holds a bright yellow amphibious airplane. It’s the one you may have seen skimming across Glimmerglass on a summer’s day. He pauses and looks around the wide valley, where an occasional plane lands or takes off. “It’s run without pretense or rules,” he observed. “It’s just free.” How do you bring historic figures to life? Re-imagine them, perhaps, in modern guise. “I always pictured him as Burt Lancaster, only bigger. This guy was – come on! – bigger than life.” Playwright Ron Nash was talking about William Cooper, who has been defined in many minds by Gilbert Stuart’s formal portrait in The Fenimore Art Museum (and on this newspaper’s current flag) of that powder-wigged figure, a bit of a stiff. Nash’s countervision informs “Lord of the Wilderness,” his almost-completed play on Cooperstown’s founder, a public reading of which will be a centerpiece of The Rustic Revel, the Leatherstocking Theatre’s end-of-summer fundraiser slash entertainment slash dance slash feast Sunday, Aug. 31, at the Otsego Golf Club at the lake’s north end. (“People can eat with their fingers if they want,” declares Leatherstocking’s Sam Goodyear. OK; will do!) But Ron, whose picaresque writing, acting and set-designing career has taken him from Lake Placid to Geneseo, Manhattan, Sweden, the Rockies, Pittsburgh, the Hamptons – with stops in between – and, finally, northern Delaware County, didn’t arrive at that vision of William Cooper overnight. The story goes back 8-10 years when Niles Hartman was directing Mamet’s “Noises Off” for Leatherstocking, and the two men met. “He wanted me to write a play on Cooper,” said Ron. “We would do it all at The Farmers’ Museum.” A lot of enthusiasm was generated. There would be audience participation on the green. Everyone was aboard. Then Hartman came up with a budget that “was out of this world. We don’t need that much, I told him; I don’t need that much.” The $50,000 price tag killed the project, and Ron Nash was left with a stack of unread books about Cooper. A few years later, recuperating from a mishap at his summer home in Harpersfield – he’s been spending winters near his daughters in California – he picked up “The Pioneers,” James Fenimore Cooper’s re-creation of Cooperstown as Templeton and his father as Judge Marmaduke Temple. Forty pages in, he was hooked. He picked up William Cooper’s “Guide to the Wilderness,” and Alan Taylor’s “William Cooper’s Town,” the Pulitzer-winning treatment of our founding father. “I started reading them in tandem,” said Ron. The vision of the ambitious, striving, social-climbing William Cooper wrestling in the mud for a mortgage payment thrilled him. He would write that play, he declared to himself, then sat up with a jolt, “Oh my god, what if someone’s done it!” That turned out not to be, and Ron was on his way. He finished the first draft by March 1 and sent it to a buddy of his, Michael Winks, in New York City, who told him, typically – “we get out the knives and sharpen them” – the play didn’t really get going until Scene Seven. Too much background. Meanwhile, Sam Goodyear was developing the idea that became The Rustic Revel, and Ron Nash figured in it. A few weeks ago, Ron came up for lunch with Sam and Jeff Reynolds, chairman of the Leatherstocking board, and its ended up lasting a couple of hours. What was lacking, they agreed, was a sufficient antagonist. Ron had been envisioning religion as the foil to Cooper’s agnosticism, but hadn’t warmed to that conflict. Sam said, “Well, we have Salieri and Mozart.” That did it. John Hartwick, of course, that nutty preacher south of town who was rigidity itself, a perfect foil for William Cooper’s flexibility. So Nash has been polishing up a final version. Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. has agreed to play his ancestor. What more’s to be said? 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