Joe's Bad Boy

Jacob was never much. His mother died of consumption when he was very small. Papa Djugashvili (who later called himself Stalin) used to try to toughen up little Jacob's lungs by blowing pipe smoke in his face. So Jacob took up smoking before he was ten; and his father had to beat him for that.

Papa Joe tried to make an engineer of Jacob, but Jacob was a lazy fellow. He would not study at technical school. Papa Joe is said to have said, "If you do not want to be an engineer, be a cobbler"--and packed Jacob off to an obscure corner of Georgia, where Papa Joe's own papa had been a cobbler.

From then on, Jacob Djugashvili, son. of Joseph Stalin, was nobody. No one in the foreign embassies in Moscow ever met him; all they heard was tenuous gossip: Jacob secretly running off with a poor seamstress . . . Jacob working in a factory to boost morale . . . Jacob not doing; very well at the Commissariat for Heavy Industry. Finally he disappeared into the Army.

Last week the Germans announced that Panzer forces under General Rudolf Schmidt had in the course of fighting the Fourteenth Howitzer Artillery Regiment of the Fourteenth Soviet Mechanized Division, captured Jacob, son of Joseph Stalin. They were very proud of the feat, and issued pictures of the wonderful heir. But all they had was a boy with a hangdog look, who was never much.

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