Douglas High graduate picks the right price

Wellington resident Katie Kolbe was still glowing after watching her appearance on "The Price is Right" on Wednesday morning.

The 2001 Douglas High School graduate is a big fan of the show.

"I watch it every day I can," she said on Wednesday. "I had my mom and grandmother on three-way on the phone while I was watching myself."

Katie wrote for tickets to the show and received them for the Oct. 10 airing, which just happened to be her 24th birthday.

"It was so fun that I got to go on my birthday," she said.

She and fiancé Chris Christian went down to Los Angeles and got up at 4 a.m. on the day of the show. Apparently, the process for actually getting into the audience required some patience.

"There were 132 people in front of us when we got in line at 4:45 a.m.," she said. "They gave us a will-call ticket to return at 9:45 a.m."

When the couple returned they were given yet another will-call and at 10:30 a.m. were able to sit in the audience holding area.

"They gave us a ticket to get ready for the audience," Katie said. "Then everyone goes through an audition. There were 10-12 people in a group and you had 10 seconds to make an impression. The man next to me was talking about his occupation and I started to laugh and I snorted."

After that when each person gave their occupation, they turned to her and asked if it was funny, and she said yes.

"That snort worked," she said. "Thank you, mom."

Katie was thrilled that she got to meet Bob Barker on her birthday. It's his last year on the show.

"I accidentally touched his butt," she said. "He's very tall and I went to hug him and my hand went all the way around and said hello."

So, tell her what she won, Rich.

A 5-piece bedroom set and no fewer than four digital cameras.

Katie is a personal trainer and nutritionist. She is a graduate of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute. She purchased her home in southern Douglas County two years ago with her fiancé.

Her mother is Laura "Charlie" Kolbe, who worked as a pitboss at Sharkey's for many years.

The next game show she wants to appear on? "Deal or No Deal," she said.

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The Carson Valley Inn's Bill Henderson dropped me a note that a half-dozen of the folks involved with the community food drive were meeting at the entrance of the Carson Valley RV Resort on Tuesday when they got a nice surprise.

The chief photographer for Channel 2 was there and they were working out the logistics for the Dec. 15 event when a lady in a white car pulls up and asks if they're taking donations.

"One of the gentlemen said yes, she handed him a crisp $100 bill and said 'Here you are,'" Bill said. "We smiled and said thank you and, before we could digest what had happened, she had already driven off."

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Speaking of Channel 2, they did a big package on Carl Lackey and Nevada's urban black bears on Tuesday night. I'm pretty pleased to say Susie Vasquez's story about Lackey got some good traction, including being picked up by the Associated Press.

I like to watch how these stories spread. It's like dropping food coloring into a glass of water to watch Brownian motion. On the Friday after Thanksgiving I printed an article about the Paiute Tribe challenging water diversions. The article came from our sister publication, Northern Nevada Business Weekly. It appeared on their front page on Oct. 13. Five weeks later when I printed the story, it showed up in three of our dailies and the Associated Press. That got it into the Reno Gazette-Journal and onto television. It was news when it showed up in print the first time and I guess it was still news more than a month later.

n Kurt Hildebrand is editor of The Record-Courier. Reach him at khildebrand@recordcourier.com or 782-5121, ext. 215.