The college lives of former Lookout Mountain residents George and Jack Fontaine of Houston are reflected in generous donations they recently gave to the University of Georgia, their alma mater.

Their gifts also landed them on the cover of the September edition of the school’s widely circulated Georgia Magazine.

George Fontaine, who graduated from Baylor School in 1972, donated $500,000 of his own money and $250,000 from his family’s foundation to help start a music business program at the Athens school, while 1975 Baylor grad, Jack, and his wife, Nancy, donated $2 million to endow an alcohol awareness and education program.

Although the two sons of the late Elizabeth Lupton Davenport made their gifts at approximately the same time, they took divergent paths in getting there.

According to the lengthy article in the magazine, written by editor Kelly Simmons, George had enrolled at Georgia in 1972, despite being a Tennessee Volunteer sports fan for much of his life. He joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which has historically drawn a number of Baylor and McCallie graduates.

As the fraternity’s social chairman, he began booking bands for various fraternity house parties. But perhaps his most important booking was marrying his Chattanooga high school sweetheart, Celia, while he was in school.

He also eventually helped reopen the historic Georgia Theatre in Athens as a concert hall. Before the theater opened, however, his family urged him to move to Houston and become involved with the Lupton family’s Coca-Cola bottling business there. A few years after the family sold the massive bottling operations in 1986, George and a partner opened an independent record label, which produced the albums of such well-known artists as Delbert McClinton and Dwight Yoakam.

Following a chance meeting with a Nashville songwriter and fellow University of Georgia graduate named Bruce Burch, George heard Mr. Burch’s idea that the university needed to start a music business program, in part because of the growing music industry in Athens and Atlanta. All the school needed was someone to fund it, and they found their man in George.

Approximately 75 students are now involved in the infant program.

George has also become reconnected with the Athens community through a 2,000-acre farm he bought in nearby Elberton and the fact that his youngest son, Cartter, is now a freshman there.

If Jack’s life at Georgia could be characterized by music, he would have been singing the blues during much of it. As he openly discusses in the article, he battled alcohol and drug abuse during college. In fact, his partying cost him his education, he says, and he dropped out of school in 1978 before graduating.

He also moved to Houston and went to work for the bottling company. He first did menial jobs, as George had done. He met his wife, Nancy, in 1980 and they married a short time later. Although the surroundings had changed for Jack, his lifestyle had not. He admittedly was still abusing alcohol and drugs when his first son, John, was born in 1984.

By 1987, however, he entered a treatment center and was able to gain sobriety.

But alcohol would still have a negative effect on him, despite his sobriety, Ms. Simmons writes.

In 2000, his son, John, who was 16, made the poor decision to get into an automobile with someone who had been drinking, despite his parents’ previous warnings. Unfortunately, a traffic accident claimed his life.

After their second son, Harrison, was making plans to enroll at Georgia, Jack began thinking about all the negatives that substance abuse had on his college years. To help others not have to battle the same demons he did, he and his wife made the generous gift to endow a new alcohol education program. The program is designed to help the school combat more proactively the problems related to college drinking.

Today, the center is called the John Fontaine Jr. Center for Alcohol Awareness and Education after their late son.

University of Georgia President Michael Adams, who graduated from Chattanooga High School in 1966, gave much praise to the Fontaines in the article. “They put their money where their mouths and their hearts are,” he said.