Google the word “Columbine” and the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia page titled “Columbine High School Massacre.”

One of the many lingering indignities from what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Say that word and people no longer conjure the state flower of Colorado. Not Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters, not Jeanie Schroder of DeVotchKa, not baseball player Darrel Akerfelds. 

They think of the infamous mass shooting in 1999. That’s terribly unfair to the thousands of quality Columbine teachers, students, parents and administrators before and since – but that’s just how our brains work.  

Now Denver East, the city’s oldest and proudest public high school, is in danger of becoming another epithet. Denver East: Two school shootings in six weeks. 

East, which opened as a leaky log cabin schoolhouse in 1859, has never been without its problems. You can trace them like the history of America itself over the past century: Segregation, busing, violence, gangs, drugs.

Guns.

But it would be a travesty for the past few months to erase 160 years of success stories coming out of a school like no other in Denver history.

Denver East has graduated eventual politicians, professional athletes, architects, scientists and business titans. It germinated diplomat Madeleine Albright and astronaut Jack Swigert. But the wide-ranging list of creative artists who were nurtured by East High School – actors, authors, singers and musicians – is even more impressive.

Long before there were dedicated performing-arts schools like Denver School of the Arts, there was Denver East. Its notable artsy alumni include Judy Collins, who just released her 29th album at age 83. Collins has said her time at East was “truly formative.” That’s when she traded her classical piano for a second-hand guitar – a gift from her father – and went on to become one of the pre-eminent folk and pop singers of the past century.

“When I was a girl in Colorado

I could conquer anything.

I could fly with wings of silver

I could whisper. I could sing.”  – Judy Collins

Then there’s Oscar-winning actor Don Cheadle. Antoinette Perry, namesake of Broadway’s Tony Awards. Silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. Jazz greats Ron Miles and Bill Frisell. TV and film star Ward Bond (he was Bert the cop in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”). TV producer Sidney Sheldon, who created hits like “The Patty Duke Show” and “I Dream of Jeannie” before turning to romance suspense novels that sold more than 300 million copies in 51 languages. Sculptor Gladys Caldwell Fisher. Public speaker and author Marilyn Van Derbur Atler. Iconic blaxploitation film star Pam Grier, forever known as both Foxy and Jackie Brown. Colorado Black Arts Festival founder M. Perry Ayers. Longtime local actor Roger L. Simon.

East graduated multi-octave vocalist Philip Bailey (who has sold 90 million records), along with  fellow Earth, Wind & Fire bandmates Larry Dunn and Andrew Woolfolk. Bailey credits much of his success to the training he received at East, which he considered to be the equivalent of attending a college music conservatory.

“We were very fortunate to come up in a time when music in the Denver Public Schools system was very supported and very serious,” he told me.

More recent additions include comedian and actor T.J. Miller (“Deadpool”). Tattered Cover Book Store owner Kwame Spearman. Harlem-based mixed-media artist Jordan Casteel. And Regan Linton, who last year became just the fourth wheelchair-using actor ever to be cast in a Broadway production.

Melody Duggan, Miller’s teacher in 1999, said the “Cloverfield” actor “was the quintessential, irrepressible class clown.” But he was also a showstopping actor in dramas like Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” and in musicals like “The Music Man.”

Not all of the eventually famous who have attended East graduated. Silent film and Broadway star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was reportedly expelled around 1900 for cutting the strings on the school piano. Actor Hattie McDaniel, the first Black actor to win an Academy Award (for “Gone with the Wind” in 1939), left as a sophomore to become a full-time minstrel performer in 1910. Denver dance legend Cleo Parker Robinson attended East for two years, but when archrival George Washington opened in 1960, her house was on the other side of the dividing line. According to the Denver Public Library, Beat poet Neal Cassady attended East sporadically enough to be considered a student there – he just never showed up on a yearbook photo day.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about that brief snapshot of creative luminaries is how many are artists of color, especially given how few students enrolled at East were anything but white before Denver Public Schools began active integration efforts in 1969.

Grier, who had graduated two years before in 1967, performed in school plays at East but once told local journalist Lisa Kennedy she regretted that race relations at the time didn’t allow her more career opportunities.

“When I was coming up, I wanted to be a scientist or a zoologist,” she told Kennedy, herself an East grad. “My counselor told me I could be a secretary.”

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that Denver had to bus students around the city to achieve racial balance in schools. But according to History Colorado, East was seen as a model for successful integration because “East administrators, teachers and students all made a point of asking Black students into their homes, churches and neighborhoods on the theory that getting to know each other would lessen fears and promote camaraderie.”

In very short order, East shifted from a student body of mostly wealthy whites to one that was far more diverse.

“I think those young artists were in a school that welcomed their voice and their creativity and their abilities,” said Dick Nelson, the school’s historian. “Even in those early days, they thrived, I think, in the openness of East High.”

Linton, too, fondly remembers East as an incubator of diverse talent. That starts back in 1926, Nelson said, when the school moved to its present, majestic home at 16th and Elizabeth streets to get a safe distance away from the saloons and other problems of downtown. But Denver quickly grew up and around the new school, which has long been seen as resting at the center of the city. East’s location, said Linton, is what has made the school a true melting pot of artistic talent and social identities.

“East has always drawn people from very different places and very different ways of thinking,” said Linton, former artistic director of Denver’s disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company. “I think the artistry at East is more interesting and more robust than other schools because it attracts a much wider range of people who are coming in with their own unique life stories. And that just makes the art better.”

Nelson gives most of the credit for East’s impressive alumni roster to the school’s faculty and leadership, specifically “two really outstanding and progressive principals,” Roscoe Hill and Robert L. Colwell. He cites legendary art, speech and theater teachers past and present including Helen Perry, Hal Clerihue, Genevieve Kreer, Melody Duggan and Will Taylor.

Broadway actor Lynn Andrews, from the class of 2004, cites both Taylor (her choir teacher), and Duggan (her theater teacher). Duggan gave students of color the chance to play roles they might not be considered for at other schools, said Andrews, who was cast to play the German innkeeper Fraulein Schneider in “Cabaret” opposite a black student playing her Jewish love interest. “Every lesson Melody taught about theater also applied to life,” she said.

East’s reputation as a progressive, innovative and some might say renegade school traces to 1932, when it was chosen as one of 30 schools nationally to participate in an eight-year study called “An Adventure in American Education.” The project allowed East to depart from a generally accepted college-preparatory curriculum and instead design courses and programs that were more directly relevant to the lives of its 1,600 individual students.

Colwell, who was principal from 1960-74, later said his school’s reputation for radical innovation carried well into the 1970s and helped the school navigate much of the political and social turbulence of the times, including violence over forced busing.

“I remember the pride of having been a part of the study, and being recognized as one of the big progressive schools in the country,” Colwell said in 1974. And Nelson, who taught at East from 1964-95, said “that progressive way of thinking was passed on down to teachers like myself.”

Linton believes what distinguished East from other schools was its lack of cliques. “There are no silos,” she said. “Silos lead to alienation, and alienation leads to violence.”

Speaking of violence, Linton believes it is unfair for anyone to draw too harsh a conclusion about the presumed gun culture at East based on the two recent incidents. The first shooter was not from East, and the second had been expelled from another high school in Aurora.

“As we have all seen, this kind of thing could happen anywhere,” Linton said. “A troubled kid is not necessarily indicative of a community or its culture. It’s more an indication of how we, as a society, are supporting kids who are not doing well.”

East’s reputation has taken a beating of late, Nelson said, but the school has adapted throughout its history – and it will again now.

“I think that’s why it’s still a relevant institution,” he said. “Many urban high schools in this country have gone right into oblivion. But this one has learned not only to adapt to the times but to be a voice in the times. And I think the kids feel that freedom.

“East High School has a proud athletic history, but I think the real draw is the speech teams, the constitutional scholars, the drama productions and the art programs. That is absolutely how these students find a sense of community. And that community is why East has survived.”