WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis. - After a while at a job, you develop a few routines, and Lou Stettin, 93, has hers.

By 4 p.m. she's dressed in her work clothes -maybe the rhinestone dress if it's pleasant, sensible black velveteen if it's chilly. When she gets to work, there's a pre-show routine -one whiskey old-fashioned, one cup of soup.

"I like to shoot the bunk with the bartender and catch up on all the scandal," she says.

But then she's ready to settle in behind the baby grand piano for an evening of lounge music.

If you've dined at the House of Embers anytime since the Eisenhower Administration, your evening might have been accompanied by her piano classics. Stettin has been playing since her daughter Barbara and son-in-law Wally Obois opened the restaurant in 1959. Now that her grandsons Mike and Mark are the owners, it is the duty of whomever works "the front of the house" on Sunday night to pick up grandma and bring her to her regular gig.

"I look forward to Sunday nights," she says.

And so do the customers, although if they ever had a chance to chat with her, they might ask her to stop playing and join them for a drink.

Stettin's life spans the era of horse-drawn carriages, the birth of the jazz age and the time when the tourism industry in the Dells meant taking travelers into your home and making them breakfast the next morning on a cook stove for 35 cents. She's played piano for Tommy Thompson's inauguration, and for
Al Capone's hoodlums in 1920s Chicago. But she's also as up-to-date as today's headlines.

"Ask her about the election," prods grandson Mike Obois, with a smile. And so I do.

"They should have voted for the one with the brains, that (Ralph) Nader, he's my boy," says Stettin, who hasn't yet taken the Nader sign down from her window. "I think he's one smart cookie."

Lou Stettin was born Louise Hinz in Chicago on St. Patrick's Day 1907. Her father ran a grocery store on the South Side and played fiddle. When he would close up at night, he'd play music with Louise and her sisters.
She still remembers her first trip to Wisconsin Dells -a nine day epic in a horse-drawn carriage.

"I was about 8 or 9 years old, my grandparents in Lyndon Station wanted the buggy, and my dad said he would bring it up," she recalls. But it rained the whole trip, the bridges (which were just planks) washed away, and the horse took sick. The family spent three "nights in a farmhouse near Bristol.

"They put us up," she says of the family that took them in, "made us chicken and ham dinner, and didn't charge us a thing."

In exchange, Stettin played her first gig -entertaining the host family by playing their organ while one of her sisters pumped the foot pedal. The family spent another night sleeping in the buggy in a churchyard, before they finally reached Lyndon Station.

"My grandfather had the whole farmhouse decorated with American flags for us," she recalls. "My grand father was from Germany, but he was so proud to be American, he thought this was the best country there was."

Stettin spent her young adulthood in Chicago, where she was awn in by the new musical style called jazz. Her father didn't agree.

"For a while he quit paying for my (music) lessons," she says. "He said, 'No, I'm not paying 50cents
for that nonsense music.'"

Of course, the Roaring 2Os were when Chicago mobsters ruled the city. Stettin says she used to see Al Capone and his bodyguard Drive past her home.

"I knew a couple of his bodyguards," she says, of the days when she worked at one of the original Walgreen's stores in the Chicago Loop. "They said to come in to buy the best cigars."

Her parents moved to Wisconsin Dells in the 1920s, where they took in tourists and cooked them breakfast.

"The Dells was beautiful back then," she recalls. "So green and so many trees, the treetops would meet in the middle of the street."

Lou married Ed Stettin in 1928, and they raised their family in Chicago and Battle Creek, Mich., , where he ran a trucking company and was involved in Teamster union politics. Ed and Lou moved to the Dells in 1944, and she waited tables for a while at Buckley's restaurant, before she and Ed opened their restaurant, The Green Door, which they ran for 30 years.

Mike Obois says the grandparents were second parents, taking the kids fishing and caring for them while their parents worked at tile restaurant. For every one of their birthdays, he says, his grandmother would make her special cake, which she learned to make at a baking school in Chicago.

"It's a white cake, with two pounds of butter, 22 egg yolks and butter cream icing -it's wonderful and rich," he says. "She always used to make it on our birthdays, and now the tide has turned, and he make it for her."

Both Mike and Mark are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, but that doesn't stop Stettin from carefully critiquing the cake to make sure they sifted the flour the required three times.

Stettin's long commitment to the Dells was honored in September when she served as grand marshal.
of the Wo-Zha-Wa Days parade. She wore a flashy rhinestone dress, a Carmen Miranda hat and waved so hard she put her livelihood in jeopardy.

"My arm hurt," she says, "and I had to play that night."

"Having her in the restaurant on Sunday nights is another Obois family tradition. Mike Obois says his parents usually took Sundays off, so Stettin would work that night so someone from the family would be present.

"Sundays," he says, "Have always been grandma's night."