The soothing voice that transports listeners to faraway places is still there.

Visitors to the famed Nationality Rooms inside the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning can still hear E. Maxine Bruhns, 96, pay tribute to the countries and cultures of immigrants who helped shape Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. They simply have to flip an audio switch.

Narrations that she researched and wrote for nearly all of the 31 classrooms, each intended to represent those nations before Pitt’s 1787 founding, are part of the legacy of a West Virginia native who spent more than half a century as Nationality Rooms director before retiring this year, citing health issues.

Her departure means that for the first time in 54 years, a new director will be sought for the rooms whose rich wood, stained glass, colorful artifacts and other furnishings are of museum quality, yet serve as modern-day classrooms for Pitt students.

Creating an updated job description for the woman who supervised it all could be tough given the web of duties that Ms. Bruhns embraced — from greeting world dignitaries and fundraising, to crawling around in a hard hat during maintenance inspections.

Throughout her tenure, the rooms had no greater fan or fierce protector, said Maryann Sivak, assistant to the director.

“They were her children,” she said. “People would ask her which one was her favorite, and she would say ‘They’re all my favorites.’”

Ms. Bruhns was not available to be interviewed for this story.

In a farewell to the campus published in the Nationality Rooms newsletter, she referenced health setbacks but focused more on her beloved rooms and a world view influenced by a period starting in the 1940s when she lived and traveled through Europe, Africa and Asia with her husband Fred C. Bruhns, who later taught at Pitt.

Mr. Bruhns, who worked in refugee resettlement, died in 2006 at age 90.

“In 15 years, we never stayed more than two years in any one place. I survived all of these different moves with no tragedies and learning not to hate but always appreciating the culture in which I was living,” she wrote. “I brought that back with me and found this marvelous job … .”

Each room — Russian, Hungarian, German, Swedish, Ukrainian, Israel, Norwegian, African, English, Philippine and others — is distinctive, built with donations from immigrant communities proud of what their sweat in the Pittsburgh steel mills and elsewhere achieved.

About 25,000 visitors a year pay to tour the rooms on the first and third floors of the 42-story Cathedral, the tallest classroom building in the Western Hemisphere. Those patrons (adults pay $4 and youths $2) are in addition to others who poke their heads into the rooms during the semester while classes are in session.

University officials said they hope by summer to identify a successor for Ms. Bruhns.

That person will need to embrace the digital age, while safeguarding the authenticity of a landmark whose oldest rooms date to 1938.

“We want someone who is global in mind, but also someone who can understand Pittsburgh and its history and knows what these Nationality rooms have meant,” said Ariel Armony, vice provost for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies.

Ms. Bruhns was decades ahead of many in embracing international study, he said. She immersed herself in the cultures of each room — the festivals and the personalities tied to them — knowing that a strong presence within each ethnic community solidified their bond with the university.

She never got used to the computer, said staff, who would print out emails for her. Around the cathedral, she was a force far larger than her 5-foot-4-inch, 100-pound frame — not shy about letting everyone know what needed to get done and not above a little colorful language for effect.

Her complex travels took her to 83 countries, many with her husband. They left her with some simple truths.

“She’d always say, ‘We all came from someplace,” said Ms. Sivak. “She accepted the fact that we all come with our own customs and cultures and they’re all different, and yet we’re able to be accepted into this country.

“Everyone felt she was on their side.”

Ms. Bruhns’s soft, in-room recorded narrations resemble the practiced speech of a museum guide. They blend history, geography, culture and architecture into mini-lectures, with references to Christianity and Noah’s Ark in one room and Mecca and Mohammad in another.

“You have entered the Armenian nationality room through a doorway which tells more of the story of these remarkable people ...,” her voice informs those standing inside the 21st nationality room, later adding: “The stone arch is carved with grapes and pomegranate. These fruits, so prevalent in the area, are symbolic of a fertile land.”

Ms. Bruhn's narration for the Armenian Room:

In another room, as strains of the bandura are heard behind her, the narration tells visitors they, in effect, are in the reception room of an Eastern European home from the 18th century. “The importance of hospitality to Ukrainians is reflected in their proverb: ‘When a guest enters the house, God enters the home.’”

Ms. Bruhns steadfastly steered the rooms clear of politics and protected their historical accuracy, said Michael Walter, the rooms’ tour coordinator.

As the Soviet Union dissolved, some encouraged renaming the Czechoslovak room the Czech-Slovak room, but she said that was out of line with the room’s history.

Yet she also advocated for a Ukrainian room, though at the time, it was a state within the Soviet Union and not a sovereign nation.

On a research campus where clout is wielded by surgeons, scientists and executives with tongue-twisting titles, Ms. Bruhns drew her authority from a different place.

Said Mr. Walter, “She talked to everyone.”

Born in 1924 as E. Maxine Moose, she grew up 100 miles or so south of Pittsburgh in Grafton, W.Va., owned a pitbull, raised chickens and two piglets that her mother won in a hog-calling contest at a 4-H club, according to co-workers.

As she grew, so did Pitt’s massive Cathedral of Learning, an Indiana limestone structure symbolizing the university’s reach. It was commissioned three years before her birth and built between 1926 and 1936.

A photograph of a young E. Maxine Bruhns is displayed in the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland. (Nate Guidry/Post-Gazette)

Then-Chancellor John Bowman, who promoted the Cathedral, sought to harness the enthusiasm of immigrant mill workers by establishing classrooms that would honor their traditions and inspire their children to seek a college education. That idea became the Nationality Rooms.

Staff say Ms. Bruhns has always worn her rural roots with pride, often calling herself a “by-gosh hillbilly.” She was an insatiably curious traveler and passionate voice for global scholarship at Pitt, a commuter campus in the 1960s beginning to realize its global aspirations.

But her spontaneity was never far away. One day she greeted young 4-H club members from Westmoreland County with a hog call in the Cathedral’s Commons Room.

On the building’s third floor, just past the Armenian and Swiss rooms, two wall display cases are filled with artifacts and memories from her travels — many before she arrived at Pitt.

Some are beautiful, if obscure, like the Mende mask from Sierra Leone, and the white oak plate and vessel from 20th-century Ukraine, crockery made from a tree sacred to Ukrainians.

Other mementos leap out:  the photo of Ms. Bruhns standing with Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the theologian, humanitarian and physician of the early 20th century, whom she spent 36 hours with in 1964 while on the west coast of Africa.

She and her late husband hopscotched the globe before arriving at Pitt in 1965. During that time, Ms. Bruhns learned to speak French “well,” German “with cute little mistakes,” and “conversational” Arabic, Farsi and Greek, she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2006. She knew “basic” Italian and Cambodian and “emergency” Spanish and Chinese, she said.

The couple ventured to Austria shortly after World War II to resettle war refugees, she said in the interview. Then it was off to Beirut, where the Ohio State University alumna finished a master’s degree and her husband examined the Palestinian refugee crisis.

They were in South Vietnam in 1955 to help refugees fleeing from the north. Then there was Cambodia, and later, Iran during the reign of the Shah.

“We were supposed to go to Baghdad, but they had just killed the king, so they sent us to Tehran,” she said.

At Pitt, her tenure dating nearly to the Cuban missile crisis generated colorful experiences and stories, from rice she shared with co-workers that had been blessed by the Dalai Lama and given to her during a visit to Oakland, to recollections of a tour of the Nationality Rooms by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, several years before she began her job.

“He didn’t like the Russian room because it didn’t have any symbols of his beliefs,” she told the Post-Gazette in 2007. “They took him up to the Early American room and he said, ‘Now this is a Russian room.’ It had a big fireplace, a wooden floor, big heavy wooden beams and a carved table.”

Yet her most colorful stories may be the recorded room descriptions themselves, like that of the Syria-Lebanon Room, originally a library in a fine Damascus home dating to 1782.

“Linden-paneled walls and ceiling are decorated with Gesso painting, in which a mixture of chalk and glue is applied by brush in intricate relief then painted and overlaid with silver and gold leaf.’’

The images may be why Ms. Bruhns was at peace telling an interviewer in 2006 that she doesn’t need to travel much anymore.

“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.”

Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, and on Twitter: @Bschackner