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Blue collar workers filled many of the labor-intensive positions at Heartland Pump, a Carterville company that was sold to a global corporation in 2012.
At the end of a grueling shift, back in the day of local ownership, the company parking lot would be full of employees covered in mud from boots to hips, knuckles bloody from hours of banging wrenches into steel pipes. They specialized in placement of enormous industrial equipment that could turn huge bodies of water into tiny mud puddles within a few hours.
Imagine the after-hours group chatter, which probably ranged from disbelief to guarded anticipation, when they heard one of their co-workers was going to provide musical entertainment at the annual Christmas party.