When people hear that Diane Gilbert grew up in Macomb, Illinois, their first instinct is sometimes to say, “Oh, so you lived in Mayberry.”

She lets that land for a moment. Then she smiles.

The girl who grew up in that square-and-steeple Midwestern town went on to plan 40 international business trips and personally travel to India 27 times. She helped build technology partnerships spanning two hemispheres, guided colleagues through one of the most culturally complex countries on earth, and once had to manage an incoming travel group from 12 time zones away after leaving Hyderabad two hours before three bombs went off in the city.

Mayberry, it wasn't. But Macomb, she'll tell you, is where it all started.

Gilbert graduated from Macomb High School in 1981, the daughter of two educators who modeled both intellectual ambition and an old-fashioned work ethic. Her father grew up on a farm in Iowa and made his name the hard way — including a stint substitute-teaching typing at Harrison High School on the south side of Chicago, a school rough enough that his classroom had bullet holes in the wall. When the regular teacher quit at the end of his first day, the administration asked if he wanted the job. He took it.

"He was very resilient that way," Diane said. He used to tell his kids: The man in the dirty overalls walking into the bank may be the wealthiest man in town. He eventually earned his doctorate from the University of Iowa and joined the marketing faculty at Western Illinois University, which is what brought the family to Macomb.

Her mother earned a master's in economics from the University of Northern Iowa — unusual for a woman in that era — and later taught business courses at Western.

Education in the Gilbert household was not optional. It was simply assumed.

Growing up on the edge of a university campus exposed Diane to a world that most small-town students didn't encounter. The music department at Western fed private lesson instructors into the high school program, which she describes as genuinely exceptional. Exchange students from Germany, New Zealand, and Australia arrived through the American Field Service program — a club Diane joined and eventually led as president. She played flute and piccolo in band, sang in choir, performed in the orchestra, marched in the color guard, and served as associate editor of the school newspaper.

When she tells friends back in Arizona what high school looked like, she's used to their confusion. At the larger schools their kids attended, you had to choose: basketball or band, academics or activities. "In Macomb," she said, "you weren't limited like that."

She took French for four years in high school and continued for another two and a half years at Western Illinois University, where she earned a degree in elementary education — and where she met the man who would become her husband. She moved to Bloomington after graduation, completed her student teaching, then spent several years teaching elementary school while simultaneously earning a master's degree and raising a young child, taking 20 or 21 credit hours at a stretch. People would ask how she was managing it all.

"I don't know," she'd tell them. "Ask me when I'm done."

She finished. And then she made a pivot.

Technology was changing everything, and a major insurance company in Bloomington offered both a career path and a chance to use her teacher's instinct in a new direction. She joined their systems team and spent nearly three decades in programming, systems analysis, email platform deployment, and eventually software risk analysis.

But the work that defined her career had no official title. She called it her side hustle.

When her division began developing relationships with technology partners in India, Diane recognized an opening. She started organizing the trips, learning the culture, building the logistical fluency that 27 visits would eventually bring. She prepared colleagues for what they were walking into — the food, the customs, the rhythms of doing business on the other side of the world. When a security incident required fast decisions from thousands of miles away on a 12-hour time difference, she handled it. The girl who once helped welcome exchange students from New Zealand and Australia as a teenager in Macomb had quietly become the person a large American company trusted to bridge continents.

Her sister still lives in Macomb, married to a farmer. Her mother is in assisted living there. Diane gets back regularly.

She lives in the East Valley of Arizona now — and yes, she knows the irony that her suburb is called Gilbert.

"I never felt like I lacked anything," she said of growing up in Macomb.

The woman who planned 40 trips to India still means it.