FORMER BBC PRODUCER SALLY IRVINE CURATOR OF NATIVE AMERICAN EXHIBIT

Sally Irvine was a Ph.D. candidate in modern American diplomatic history at Georgetown University when the BBC asked her to help on "The Road to War," a documentary series eventually shown on A&E.

The three-month assignment developed into half a year, and in 1989 she was put in charge of the BBC's TV bureau in New York City.

"I learned on the job," said Irvine, who has been living with her mother Alice in Cape Girardeau for the past two years.

"The first few months the job was to be a historian," she said. "I wound up doing interviews."

While with the BBC, Irvine made films about post-war Japan, Adolph Hitler, defense technology, modern jazz and a variety of topics. She was still in New York when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, so she covered the U.N.

Later the BBC moved her to London where she was a producer for "News Night," the program ABC's "Nightline" was copied from.

She covered the breakup of the Soviet Union and trailed Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres around while the Middle East peace agreement was being brokered.

Irvine finally tired of the pace. "That's a twentysomething job, not a thirtysomething job," she says.

Born in Connecticut, Irvine's family moved often. Her father, a professor of social work, taught at Indiana University, the University of Connecticut at Hartford, and Washington University in St. Louis. Her years in Washington, D.C., were the longest she's spent in one place.

While in Cape Girardeau, she has been taking courses offered by Southeast's historic preservation program. She also is the curator of a new exhibit at the University Museum (see related story).

Irvine likes Southeast Missouri -- being able to see the stars and not being on guard the way big city denizens must be.

"The bedrock of decency in people is right at the surface here," she says.

Her next career move will be a return to history, she says, probably in museum work.

She has mixed feelings about finishing her dissertation, a book about John Stewart Service. Service was driven out of the Foreign Service during the McCarthy era because he was falsely suspected of being a Communist sympathizer.

Irvine says the state department's resident expert on Chinese Communism was tarred simply for predicting that Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt government would fall.

Service eventually was reinstated to the Diplomatic Corps, but was relegated to powerless jobs. He finally ended up running the Center for Chinese Studies in Berkeley, Calif., where he still lives.

Irvine's reservations are about dredging up all that unpleasantness for Service and his wife.

Besides, she says, "It would make a better film than a book."