Name one urban city that would empty its city hall, bar the mayor from his own office and allow a bunch of college students to drive a city vehicle or two. 

It's an unlikely scenario anywhere but rural America...and I feel fortunate to have been among the gate crashers.

This past weekend budding photojournalists from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale produced the third installment of 'South of 64', a photojournalism project documenting small Illinois towns led by veteran journalist and SIUC assistant professor Mark Dolan.

Students fanned out across the Tri-C area just east of Carbondale, producing photographs that told the stories of the citizens of Carterville, Cambria and Crainville.  The young photojournalists spent time with high schoolers preparing for homecoming and with pumpkin farmers. They attended the Lions Club garage sale and a wedding.

They embraced a community that welcomed them with open arms - a community that literally evacuated its own city hall in Carterville to make room for a 'photojournalism command post', home to a dozen computers for picture editors and veteran photographers that were brought in from across the country to help the students tell their stories.  The mayor's office became a home for video interviews.  And the townspeople even fed us!

Mark Dolan invited me to join the editors and I jumped at the opportunity.  Some 25 years ago I was among the students grappling with focus, with exposure, with basic storytelling.  Editors and photographers that I met during those early days shaped my work in ways that I grasped and in other ways that I've internalized but never really understood.

To some of them I've never articulated a 'thank you'.  I think they might be satisfied with a weekend of paying it forward.