BEING DAD THE TRUE GIFTS OF FATHERHOOD.

Byline: BARBARA JOAN GRUBMAN Local View

MY dad gave me my romantic soul and my view of the world. He was a combination of The Music Man, Elmer Gantry and, in his later years, Willy Loman.

When friends' fathers went to work, my dad often stayed home because he never had a steady job to go to. He floated between get-rich-quick schemes, and my mother's family called him shiftless. Although I did not know what it meant, I sensed it wasn't good. I saw him as a Renaissance man, and believed him when he told me he would invent a game to rival Monopoly.

I hung on his every word, always wanting to believe him. I allowed him to talk me into handing over the small inheritance my mom left me when she died of cancer at 47. He massaged me with words, telling me that he would ``make a killing'' at a small gas station he planned to buy. He took 16-millimeter movies of me as a child, movies that I still watch. No one else's father had a movie camera in the '30s and '40s. He did not always put food on our table, which would have long since been gone, while these precious grainy images remain.

My dad was a drummer and a saxophone player. He loved the ponies and went often to the local racetrack. In the years after my mom's death, I extracted a promise that he would stay away from the track. A few days later, I answered a call from Yonkers Raceway, saying they had found my dad's binoculars. My plea had been useless.

He would surprise me with tickets to the Broadway shows I wanted to see. He bought me not one, but two, purses that I had admired in a store window, and he could be verbally seductive.

He shaped my views on men and the kind I have allowed to enter my life. I often fooled myself into thinking that I would choose wiser than my mother had. My late husband, so different, I thought, gambled at Friday night poker games, and bet on ballgames. He announced austerity programs, as he called them, then continue to lose money even as he did.

My father would take me to sit and read in the park on a weekday afternoon. He walked in a rainstorm, saying, ``You are not going to get any less wet if you run.''

When as a teenager, I asked how I would know when I fell in love, he said, ``You won't have to ask; you will just know it.'' He drove me to Madison, Wis., for my freshman year, and surprised me with the red, white and blue sweater I had admired in a store the previous evening. My friends all liked him. He was fun and adventurous, and they saw the kid in him.

His marriage to my mom was not very good, and I knew it. This was no ``Father Knows Best.'' Handsome, in a John Barrymore sort of way, I suspect there were other women in his life. He had this disarming dimple in his left cheek, and when I was very little, I liked to place my finger on his face and then ask him to smile, hoping that I had found the exact spot where the dimple was. His sister, my Aunt Pearl, now in her late 90s, and I talk of him often. She saw him with all the love that I did, and I we both forgave him for his human frailties.

My father died on June 15, 1960, at the age of 50 from leukemia. He was 22 years younger then I am today. He left fingerprints on my heart and I named my older son, Lee, for him. My dad's name was Louis Irving Bass. He was the firstborn of Benjamin and Annie Bass who lived on Hester Street on New York's lower east side.

He had music in him, and he left me with his song.