Being There -- A Father's Day Story: A Dedicated Dad Bonds With His Children By Being A Participant In Their Lives - Auto Racing In Particular.

tan Roberts made it all the way to high school before he seriously began to lament growing up without a father.

For one reason or another, most of his friends didn't have dads, either. They lived with their mothers, an aunt, or, like Roberts, with a grandmother.

"It wasn't that uncommon," said Roberts. "But we all recognized as we got older and reflected on our childhood that we'd certainly missed out on a lot of male involvement."

Roberts wasn't sure exactly what it was he was missing, but he wasted little time in approaching the father-child bond from the other side. He was 19 when he married his Portland girlfriend, Kathy, who was 16. Within two years, they had a son, the first of three children.

Three decades later, the flow chart of priorities around the Robertses' house in rural Bothell is still easy to identify: Children, each other, work. At age 52, his job as a lithographer squeezed into three 12-hour days, Stan Roberts is the perfect picture of a dedicated father, all learned seat-of-the-pants.

"I always thought when I got married and had children I'd try to make amends for what I'd missed out on," said Roberts. "I wanted to try to be there all the time and be involved, although I had no idea what that involvement might be."

It turned out to be Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, baseball, bowling. But most of all it was car racing, a lifelong interest for Roberts that became a passion for his children.

Roberts remembers falling asleep at the race track at age 5, a bottle of warm milk in a Thermos beside him, during the years of his mother's romance with a race car driver. Years later, his youngest child did the same thing. Jonathan, now 11, became so used to falling asleep to the roar of racing motors as an infant that his parents recorded the sound for his bedtime lullaby.

Roberts never did race cars himself. Shortly into his marriage, he realized he would never have the money to be more than a spectator, but he developed a knack for discerning drivers' weaknesses and strengths.

That's one reason half a ton of gold trophies line the walls of the Robertses' home today. The children showed a talent for racing that started with quarter-scale "midget" cars, which won't even start unless a handler - most often a father - is there to give them a shove.

"The father is 90 percent of the influence on the driver," said Roberts' daughter, Tracy, who at 27 is a successful SuperModified roadster racer today. "My father had been watching races for so long that as a driver, and as one of his children, I always trusted his opinion."

In one way, Stan Roberts is at last behind the wheel, but his races are from track to track, as he gets Jonathon up and running in his midget racer and then speeds off to find Tracy in her SuperModified.

It's been that way pretty steadily around the Robertses' household since they stumbled into a display on quarter midgets at the Seattle Center more than 20 years ago.

Son Vern, now 32, was the first to get started. He expressed an interest in racing go-karts, but his father saw real potential in the quarter midgets, which are protected by a sturdy little body and run on engines that can be souped up from 2 to 16 horsepower as the driver grows.

It didn't take much pushing to get any of the Robertses' children interested.

"We wanted to do it," said Tracy Roberts, whose driving style has been described as aggressive but clean, not foolhardy. She won the Western Grand National Title in 1985. "They planned their lives so we could always go do it."

Vern let go of his other interests, including scouting, soon after he took driver training. His parents did the same.

Stan Roberts spent his evenings working on the car, with Vern at his side. On weekends, the family drove to Portland; to Graham near Tacoma; Langley, B.C., or helped host races at Paine Field. Kathy Roberts took over the local club's snack bar, helping to bankroll activities.

Daughter Tracy came along to watch at first, but took driver's training at age 6. Not long after that, the family's 1970 GMC Suburban, which today has 320,000 miles on an engine Vern recently rebuilt, learned to live without rest.

"Our vacations were mostly built around our racing activities for years," said Roberts. "We might take a couple of days of travel time on the way to or way back from events to stop to hike or sightsee, but we wanted to be at the event for as long as we needed to be."

As the older children grew into more complicated and expensive cars, Stan Roberts' dinner grew cold on the workbench beside him. A phone line was added to the garage so he could answer calls without having to leave the engine.

"One thing that I still hold with me is sitting in the grand stands when it wasn't my turn to race," Tracy recalled. "My father would take a handful of change out of his pocket and go over racing strategy with me using pennies, nickels and dimes. That helped me a lot."

Tracy who set track records all over the country was always more interested in driving than in the maintenance of cars, but Vern became a master mechanic and Jonathan shows the same potential.

"Both my sons learned the basics of how to be organized and how you go about doing things," said Roberts, a stickler for detail.

Don't do this to a car before you do this. When you're done with your work, put the tools away. If the tools are dirty, wipe them off first.

Years later, when Vern was racing stock cars, his father could hear him in the garage downstairs running through the same protocol with his five-man crew.

"A lot of that approach to doing it the right way, my son got from me," said Roberts. "And a lot of my son's friends got it from him."

There's no question that his father was his biggest influence, Vern says. He is proud to have picked up one of his father's strengths, his unconditional love. "He's a very warm, caring person." And he has learned to accept that he's picked up a couple of his dad's weaknesses: He sometimes struggles with self confidence and he can't say no to anybody.

At the height of his career, Vern Roberts placed 11th out of 550 drivers on the NASCAR circuit, doing it the hard way without major sponsorship and out of a one-car garage with a volunteer crew.

Boys were at home

What the older Robertses remember more than the trophies is that Vern's teen years came and went with little problem. Other parents called worried about their sons. But the Robertses weren't concerned. They knew the young men were downstairs with wrenches in their hands because their girlfriends were upstairs having dinner with them.

"The boys went to bed too late and too tired to get into much trouble," said Roberts.

Today, with Vern long married and expecting his first child, the Robertses still go out to dinner and movies with their older son's boyhood friends.

Vern said his friends often commented that his parents accepted them immediately. It didn't matter who they were, if they were Vern's friends, they were unequivocally welcome.

There were other perks to racing. Vern breezed through driver's education at school. In his adolescence, his parents were stopped in the parking lot by the school counselor who praised Vern's improved self esteem and confidence and said, "Whatever you did over the summer is really working." The only thing the Robertses did different was race.

"I've heard numerous fathers say to me they wish they had raced with their older children," said Kathy Roberts, "because they like the one-on-one relationship it gives them with their younger children. The father and child have to communicate in order to be successful."

By the time Jonathan came along, he thought all families had cars continually being torn apart and put together in their basements. At 2 and 3, he helped sweep and carry tools for Vern. By age 10, he had already excused himself from dinner, gone downstairs and taken the engine out of his midget racer.

"I went down there one night and not only did he have the engine out, but he had the bolts all clustered together, the two springs sitting together and he had wiped all the grease off of them," Roberts said.

The years that Jonathan has spent with older siblings has paid off. His instructors say he recognizes the value of adults' advice. He shows potential in three sports and has bowled as many as 30 games a week.

He's always been curious about how things work, said his dad, and he questions why decisions are made. "It's not a demand, he just wants to know why some things work and why others don't," said Roberts.

That might be threatening for some fathers but Roberts has long gotten past that. He "stumbled and fumbled" learning to be a dad, he said, especially when his older son tested his wings by making changes to the car without asking him first.

"It was his way of letting me know I didn't need to feel I had to be there every second for it to work successfully," said Roberts. "I should have realized that my son was not a little kid anymore."

Relaxed atmosphere

Jonathan is benefiting from his parents' experience. Although his schedule is even more hectic - this spring he changed uniforms in the back seat as his parents drove him from baseball to bowling to races - but the family approach to life is much more relaxed.

"I can't put my finger on it, but we take things easier," said Roberts.

When he was a novice father, Roberts didn't ever want to look bad. Now, he says, he sees other fathers getting excited about things at the race track that just don't worry him.

"I think sometimes Jonathan feels he needs to build a fire under me. I get excited once the kids are on the track, but I find the results work out better if I don't get all anxious about getting everything right in advance. I'm not concerned with that anymore."

Jonathan has had to give up some race practice time because his parents have taken up bowling after a 25-year lapse. They made the playoffs - unexpectedly, they say, although the family seems to win at everything.

Tracy said she was in her teens before she realized other families didn't do everything together. She plans to raise her family the same way. Jonathan already knows that many of his playmates can't get their dads out to even play catch.

"I think I'm just lucky," he said. Last year his father had the choice of taking a day off to be home for Jonathan's birthday or taking the next day off to go watch one of his baseball games.

"He said he'd rather miss my birthday than miss my game. He comes to every one he can. It makes him happy and stuff."

The Robertses never discussed parenting philosophy. Nor do they remember ever giving a thought that their teen-age marriage wouldn't gel. All of their friends from that era are divorced, even one couple that lasted 25 years.

When they look back they see they could have spent more time on their own interests or on each other, but they can't think why?

"It was fun. It's still fun. I really enjoy it," said Kathy Roberts, who has just signed up for a mother and son bowling team.

"I don't think either one of us is unhappy that we missed out because we haven't missed out," said Stan Roberts. "We've managed to get through this child rearing in troubled times with all of them growing up to be good people."