The Gun-Toting Grandma
by MICHELE MORGAN BOLTON
a newspaper article from the Times Union on Sunday, June 20, 1999 on the Capital Region page

Before Hildegard von Waldenburg became known as the gun-toting grandma, she spent most of her time baking bread, making goat cheese and enjoying the wooded serenity of the 200-acre farm she shares with her husband Fritz. But since the snowy February day when she was arrested and charged with pulling a 20-guage shotgun on a five man town work crew cutting trees along her road, the 79 year old German immigrant has rocketed to folk-hero status.

The petite great-grandmother starred in a special segment of "Court TV" and made guest appearances on more than 20 radio talk shows from Boston to Seattle. She even turned down an invitation to appear with David Letterman.

But the February incident felt chillingly similar to the time in 1945 Berlin when Russian soldiers were known to rape German women and kill their unborn. Five months pregnant herself at that time, von Waldenburg said, "I went right up to them and told them to get out. I lied and said I was the commandant's girlfriend and they would be shot if they came near me. That imaginary gun saved me and my unborn child."

The shotgun she grabbed from behind the kitchen door the day she threatened to shoot DPW workers was ultimately found to be unloaded. Nonetheless, the shot von Waldenburg did not fire was heard around the world, as far as Düsseldorf, Germany where newspapers carried the tale of the Waffen-Oma, or weapons-grandma.

Von Waldenburg insists her quest to save the trees along Cold Water Tavern Road is simply a way to focus on country roads everywhere. "I am fighting so we can still sing 'America the Beautiful,' she said, "If we don't do something, America will be nothing more than one paved road from one plaza to the next. I don't want the only country roads left to be made of plastic and displayed at Disneyland."

Read a limerick written about the Gun Toting Granny, by a neighbor