In September 1969, I returned to Lamar State College of Technology. This was the same school I had once flunked out of. I wasn't returning to a place where I had succeeded before. I was walking back into the scene of my failure. That mattered. It would have been easier to go somewhere else and pretend the first attempt had never happened. Instead, I went back. I moved to Port Neches, about seventeen miles from Lamar, and began again. This time, something was different. It wasn't Lamar.
It was me.
The Dean's List
During my first attempt at college, I had failed because I didn't know how to study and lacked the discipline necessary to succeed. When I returned, I applied myself differently. The result came quickly. My first semester back, I made the Dean's List. Think about that. The same student. The same college. Two completely different results. The first time, I flunked out. The second time, I made the Dean's List. That taught me something I have never forgotten. Failure can tell you that you are incapable.
Sometimes failure is lying to you. My first experience at Lamar had not proved that I couldn't do college work. It had proved that I wasn't doing what was necessary to succeed. There is an enormous difference between those two things. Once I learned that difference, everything changed.
Two Years and Eight Months
I was determined to finish. I attended Lamar year-round for two years and eight months. There were no long summers off. I had already learned something about summer school back at Brazosport. Now I used that same determination to move toward a college degree. I also worked. And I continued to sing and play music. Music had survived every transition in my life. It had survived the farm. It had survived my parents' divorce. It had followed me from Lohn to Brady, from Brady to Lake Jackson, and from Lake Jackson into Southeast Texas.
Now it was accompanying me through college. But college was no longer something happening around me. This time, I was doing the work.
May 1972
In May 1972, I graduated. My final grade-point average was 2.7 on a 3.0 scale—an A-minus average. During my senior year, Lamar State College of Technology became Lamar University. That meant I graduated as part of the first class under the new Lamar University name. I had done it.
That diploma meant a great deal because I knew what it had taken to earn it. My earlier failures had shown that I needed better habits and discipline, not that I was incapable of learning. Returning to Lamar and finishing proved that failure did not have to be the end of my story.