Brad Garton, Pamela Robillard Mackey and Stephen Sprouse followed different career paths upon graduating from Columbus High School, or its successor Columbus North. However, they shared one thing: success in their work.
Now they have something else in common: the well-deserved honor of being inducted into the Bull Dog Alumni Association Hall of Fame.
The ceremony for the hall’s fifth class took place Sept. 29 during pre-game activities for North’s homecoming football game.
Sprouse, a 1971 Columbus High grad who was honored posthumously, gained fame as a fashion designer and artist. He designed clothes for rock stars and bands such as Debbie Harry from the group Blondie, Billy Idol, David Bowie, Axl Rose and Duran Duran. He also was a costume creator for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Mackey, a 1974 graduate, first gained prominence as a member of the school’s gymnastics team that won state championships during her junior and seniors years. Individually, she won state titles in four events. In college she shifted her passion to law, and became an accomplished attorney in Denver for the firm Haddon, Morgan and Foreman. During her career she’s been honored by multiple trial lawyers associations, and chaired a trial lawyers task force that published a nationally recognized white paper on the best practices for Title IX investigations by universities and colleges. Mackey also represented then-Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant in 2003 during a sexual assault case in Colorado that was later dropped.
Garton, a 1975 graduate, is a professor of music composition and director of the Computer Music Center at Columbia University, a private Ivy League school in New York City, where he has worked since 1987. He also has:
•Helped co-develop RTCMIX, a music synthesis and signal processing language
•Assisted in establishing more than 50 computer music centers around the world
•Collaborated with a professor of neurobiology at Columbia Medical Center for the brainwave music project to convert brainwaves into sound
By any measure, what they have achieved in their professions is success. Their inductions are a testament to that and an example to current students of what is possible.
