Forty years ago this week, I stepped off a Continental Trailways bus at the station in Longview after a nearly 900-mile trip from Johnson City, Tennessee.

I had about $100 in cash in my pocket and a check for $110 from the job I quit a few days before after deciding I needed a change of scenery and a major attitude adjustment.

Everything else I brought with me from Tennessee fit in a small, carry-on duffel bag and a small box riding in the storage compartment on the bus.

I was 19, was on academic probation from the first college I paid gobs of money to but rarely actually visited (this was way before online classes) and had no idea what my future held.

My feeble attempt to become a teacher and a coach was sidetracked by too many nights opening my wallet at the local watering holes around the campus of East Tennessee State University and not enough nights opening a book to study.

I blamed everyone but myself when I got a letter from the college telling me I needed to take a semester off to “re-think my priorities” since my GPA looked like a tribute to James Bond (007).

My sister Darlene, who was smarter than a library, signed me up for the “hard” college classes.

My girlfriend back home demanded too much of my time on the weekends, so I couldn’t have studied if I had wanted to.

It was football season (and then basketball season, and then baseball season).

The aforementioned watering holes were too close to my dorm.

Going back to college wasn’t on my mind when I arrived in Texas that hot, July day back in 1985. I didn’t have a plan, but paying for more college classes I probably wouldn’t attend seemed like a waste of time and money.

Thankfully, I had some people step in and change my mind.

My big brother Bob, who quit school in the ninth grade and traveled the country playing lead guitar in a rock and roll band, had gotten his GED and was almost 30 when he started taking classes at Kilgore College. He promised me I would love KC. He was right.

Some credit also goes to the young men who hired me for $100 to help them unload a United Van Lines truck full of furniture in Longview so they could get to another job in San Antonio later that evening.

By the end of the day, thanks to the East Texas heat and humidity, I had seriously begun considering a return to college in hopes of landing any sort of job that allowed me to work indoors.

And then, there was Don Capps.

Pop was born in 1939, grew up dirt poor and developed the kind of work ethic that kept families alive back then and kept dreams alive later in life.

I got to play a small part in helping Pop’s dream come true when I moved to Texas and helped him clear the land he and my mom had purchased so they could live on 5 acres out in the country.

It made me realize that dreams don’t happen without hard work and determination. I’ve never forgotten that, and it has served me well during a nearly 40-year career in the newspaper business.

Thursday, I made my weekly visit out to Pop’s dream place to drink coffee on his back porch with him. He turned 86 earlier this month and walks with the help of a cane, but he sees the deer frolicking 100 yards away before I do and I have no doubt he could still work me into a pool of sweat if he wanted to.

I mentioned to him it had been 40 years since we (mostly him) had cleared the land where the house now sits and the deer visit each morning.

He was silent for several seconds before taking a sip of coffee and saying “It was a lot of work, but mornings like this make it worth all of the sweat.”

Amen, Pop.

And thanks for helping me figure out my own dream.

— Jack Stallard is sports editor of the News-Journal. Email: jack.stallard@news-journal.com; follow on X @lnjsports.