by Michelle Ku
photos by Mark Cornelison
As a college student at Michigan State University in the ’60s, Tom Janoski worked on an automotive assembly line at a Chrysler plant in Trenton, Mich.
Janoski was a piston shooter, which happened to be the second hardest job at the plant. He would pick up a piston that was located on a rack above him, compress the rings on it, stick it into a cylinder, place it into a hole in the upside down engine block, and pull a handle that would punch the piston into the engine block.
For the first two weeks on the job, about every 15th piston would get stuck. Most of the time, he would be able to straighten it before the engine block moved to the next person’s station, but about two to three times a day, Janoski couldn’t fix it in time, which