Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette E. Maxine Bruhns, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Nationality Rooms, joins the Grecian Odyssey Dancers for the Kalamatiano dance yesterday in the Cathedral of Learning Commons Room during the 80th anniversary celebration of the rooms.

E. Maxine Bruhns was a toddler in a small town in West Virginia when what would become her legacy as a champion of internationalism began: The University of Pittsburgh broke ground on its 42-story Cathedral of Learning, envisioned by the school's chancellor as an international hub.

The Nationality Rooms that she meticulously stewards in the Cathedral of Learning turn 80 this year. The indefatigable Mrs. Bruhns, who resettled refugees around the globe for nearly two decades and then spent 41 years preserving and expanding Pitt's living exhibit, is 82.

Wearing a hand-woven Mexican huipil chiapaneco -- a loose-fitting shirt -- with Israeli and Syrian bracelets and Turkish evil eye earrings at yesterday's 80th anniversary celebration, she cozied up to Mary Doreza, director of the Grecian Odyssey Dancers of East Pittsburgh, and easily persuaded Ms. Doreza to let her join the Kalamatiano folk dance before about 200 guests in the cathedral's Commons Room.

"She maintains a strong association with all of the nationalities here," said Ms. Doreza, one of many old friends attending the event in Oakland. "She's just a marvelous woman."

Mrs. Bruhns' job at Pitt has afforded her moments of glory and demanded hours of gritty labor. She has greeted a Romanian princess, the crown prince of Jordan and the Dalai Lama on their visits to Pittsburgh and jetted to six countries to approve prototypes for room designs. She taxied through back alleyways of Wuhan, Hubei Province, to find an artisan to replace a light fixture for the China room.

Since professors teach daily inside the 26 museum-quality classrooms, Mrs. Bruhns also has spent four decades making sure the names that students inevitably carve on desks and the scuff marks they make on the floors are promptly removed.

Nineteen rooms had been built by 1957. Between 1987 and 2000, Mrs. Bruhns directed the design and construction of seven others. Eight more rooms are under development -- those for Denmark, Finland, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Philippines, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey and Wales.

Each national group is instructed to decorate its room to represent its culture prior to 1787, the year the university was founded. Money raised by the nationality groups has funded 895 study-abroad scholarships and 350 faculty grants.

Many Pittsburgh natives who bring visitors to the landmark know the genesis of the Nationality Rooms -- namely, that in 1926, then-Pitt Chancellor John G. Bowman asked Mrs. Bruhns' mentor and predecessor, Ruth Crawford Mitchell, to mobilize immigrants from the nearby mills and mines to help design rooms to honor the ethnic traditions of their homelands and encourage their children to pursue a college education.

Immigrants from 43 nations populated Western Pennsylvania at the time, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg said yesterday.

Fifty percent of local residents were immigrants or children of immigrants. One of three Pitt students was an immigrant or a child of an immigrant, he said.

Perhaps a lesser known fact is that it is Mrs. Bruhns' authoritative voice narrating the tape-recorded tours of the 26 rooms. She has instructed dozens of tour guides in pronunciation.

During the years she spent abroad with her late husband, Fred C. Bruhns, the native of Grafton, W.Va., learned to speak French "well," German "with cute little mistakes" and "conversational" Arabic, Farsi and Greek. She also speaks "basic" Italian and Cambodian and "emergency" Spanish and Chinese.

In 1948, Mrs. Bruhns traveled to Austria with her husband to resettle war refugees.

Two years later, the couple relocated to Beirut, where she received a master's degree and Mr. Bruhns studied the Palestinian refugee crisis.

In 1955, they relocated to South Vietnam to work with refugees fleeing from the north.

"Next we went to Phnom Penh. We were always just one step ahead of the disasters," she said. "We were supposed to go to Baghdad, but they had just killed the king, so they sent us to Tehran."

The couple also worked for the United Nations High Commission on refugees in Germany and in Athens.

She spent 36 hours with Dr. Albert Schweitzer during their tenure with USAID in Gabon, Africa. In 1964, the couple came to Pitt and, Mrs. Bruhns said, they thought, "we'll be here two years."

Instead, they settled in Fox Chapel and sated their travel itch with two vacations abroad each year. Mr. Bruhns died this year at the age of 90.

Mrs. Bruhns said she doesn't need to travel much anymore to satisfy that urge.

"You can go around the world in about a week just from the people you speak to and the cultural events that go on in this building," she said. "It's never boring here."