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Strongly encouraged by her father, Chicago Personnel Psychologist Eldon Wonderlic, Kolbe went to Northwestern, tried journalism, then moved with her husband and two children to Arizona. Dissatisfied with their education in Scottsdale, she decided to start a summer school of her own. "It has been written for centuries that thinking is important," she says, "but that is a lot different from saying, 'I have a method of showing how to do that.' " She wanted to teach children how to think creatively and critically, to use both the analytical left side of the brain and the more intuitive right side, to improve both verbal and nonverbal communication. In five years, her school swelled from 40 students to 200, at $60 per week each.
But by now she had encountered a new problem: the lack of special materials for gifted children. So she decided to produce her own. Several major publishers rejected her ideas, telling her that the market was too small to be profitable. In 1979 she took $500 from her savings and launched a firm called Resources for the Gifted. She wrote what she calls Think-ercises. One typical example requires pupils to make a series of logical deductions to figure out how many points were scored by various members of a basketball team. Another tries to get children to think critically about language in terms of slang. How has the computer changed the meaning of common words like memory or menu? What might become slang terms of future technology?
Though her only office was a spare bedroom and her only warehouse the closet, Kolbe wrote a catalogue and sent it to 3,500 teachers and parents. Orders began to trickle in, then to flow. The first years were hard. She bought a warehouse, and it caught fire. An employee embezzled money. She divorced her husband. "I never, never feel overwhelmed," Kolbe says, a little grimly. "I enjoy a challenge."
She is now grossing about $3.5 million per year, and she is proud of never having received either government or corporate grants. Says she: "I'm a believer in the concept that if it's good, the way you'll know it is that people will pay. The bottom line is crucial because it's my report card."