Tim Weber spent four years in Carbondale, five in Kansas City, and almost a decade away from Jasper County before he came back in June of 2025. He'll tell you the years away were worth it. He'll also tell you the drive home was well worth the exhaustion.

A 2017 graduate of Newton Community High School, Weber headed south to SIU Carbondale after graduation, earned an undergraduate degree in agricultural business with a minor in finance, and then kept going — a master's degree in economics, specialization in financial institutions and markets. Then he took a commodity trading job in the Kansas City area and moved to Olathe, Kansas.

The work was fast. Tim describes it plainly: a bit of brokering, a lot of merchandising, and straight commodity trading — futures, options, physical products, corn, soybeans, cotton, soybean oil, high-fructose corn syrup. Their office in Overland Park called itself "the pit" or "the floor," joking about it, but not entirely joking either. When you needed someone, you didn't type a message or pick up the phone. You just shouted across the room. Decisions came fast and demanded yes or no right now. "You get a pretty good feel for the economy," Tim said.

Five years of it. Professionally, things were going well. Personally, something kept pulling.

Tim married Kara in November 2024. She's from Teutopolis, had worked as a neurosurgery nurse in Kansas City, and as Tim had always figured, they'd eventually head back toward southern Illinois. When a cardiology clinic position opened at Carle Health in Olney, Kara moved on it before Tim had even started looking. That set the clock ticking. "Coming back into this area, you're a little bit more limited on job options," he said. Commodity trading didn't translate geographically. Banking did. He applied to Dieterich Bank's Newton branch, got the position as a commercial and agricultural loan officer, and started work the same month they moved home.

The transition made more sense than it might look on paper. Everything Tim had spent nearly a decade learning — how markets move, how agricultural operations actually function, how risk works — translates directly into evaluating the loans that matter most to people in Jasper County. A farmer financing equipment. A business owner expanding. A producer trying to time a decision against the commodity cycle they're embedded in. Tim understands that cycle from the trading side.

What community banks do differently, he says, is take the time. A large national institution might route a rural loan through underwriters in Charlotte or Minneapolis who have no frame of reference for Jasper County. Dieterich Bank has branches from Edwardsville to Breese to Newton to Effingham — wide enough to draw on real knowledge and small enough to actually use it. "You can still take your time and service a community like Newton to the best of your ability."

There's something circular about being back. Tim's teachers and coaches at Newton Community High School — the people who took time with students, pushed them, wanted to see them make it — are part of why he's standing where he is. "I think there was always a good support system that we had around here." He's not unaware that he's now on the other side of that equation, in a role where the loan he writes or declines shapes what someone else is able to build.

He and Kara don't have children yet, but are looking forward to that. They came home to be closer to family on both sides — the six-hour drive back to Kansas City used to mean a three-day sprint between visits before turning around and driving back exhausted. Being home changes that arithmetic entirely.

His 10-year reunion is coming up next summer. He'll recognize most of the people in the room. A lot of them scattered after graduation — married, moved, settled elsewhere. Some are starting to come back.