(Enlarge) Former Glenelg Country School student Jacinda Davis has won two Emmys for her work as a producer on such documentaries as “The Curse of the Bambino” and “Vietnam POWs: Stories of Survival.”

Win another, then take some time off for a production of a different sort: raising three little boys.

That's the current career status of Jacinda Davis, who recently received Glenelg Country School's third annual Distinguished Alumni Award.

A 1990 graduate, the former West Laurel resident first spent a year in Belgium with the Rotary International Exchange Program and then went on to major in psychology at the University of Maryland, with every intention of continuing on to graduate school in the field.

But just as statistics say that most people don't wind up doing what they've trained for, she was offered a job in the area in which she had worked part-time, and the rest is, if not history, at least her story.

"I kind of fell into TV and never looked back," says Davis, who had worked at the university's ITV television station, which broadcast classes to military bases and other off-campus sites by satellite. "I really liked what I was doing, but somehow it never occurred to me I could make it a career. It was too much fun."

One day a fax came into the station from the program "America's Most Wanted," looking for an intern for its international version, "Manhunter."

Davis got the position and stayed there about six months. When that show was canceled, one of the directors began his own production company, KnightScenes Inc., and asked her to join up.

"We would get calls from people who thought we were producing porn," she recalls.

Instead, the company produced films the likes of "Vietnam POWs: Stories of Survival," an hour-long documentary commemorating the 25th anniversary of the release of those American prisoners, for the Discovery Channel.

Davis was coordinating producer, meaning she did a lot of research, coordinated the shoots, booked interviews and tracked down archival material, both at our own national archives and at those of other countries.

"The biggest job was getting the vets to agree to be interviewed, but after Rear Admiral James Stockdale decided to participate, others came on board too," she says. These included senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, filmed in his Capitol Hill office.

And when she stood on stage to pick up the 1998 Emmy for outstanding non-fiction special, "It was kind of scary. I was just 26! I remember thinking, 'Now what? Is it all downhill from here?' "

Not exactly. After the Emmy, the Discovery Channel asked the team to do a lot of "military-type shows" such as "A Supercarrier is Burning: The USS Enterprise" (2000) and "Making Marines" (2002), as well as a documentary about the Washington Monument (2000).

Davis' title, whether coordinating producer, line producer or associate producer, was "kind of random," depending on the particular job, she explains.

By 2003, she had moved on to work as associate producer of HBO's "The Curse of the Bambino," which focused on long-suffering fans of the Boston Red Sox, a team supposedly jinxed after the owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920. For that job, Davis had to track down photos and film footage to go with the story, negotiate acquisitions and deals and work on edits. It was through that project that she picked up her second Emmy, this one for outstanding sports documentary.

Later she worked with the same team, already producers of the series "When it Was a Game," on "Glory in Black and White" about the 1966 NCAA basketball championships, a story later made into the feature film "Glory Road."

With three little boys and this sporty background, Davis says it looks like she'll be the one someday tossing baseballs to Jalal, 4; Jude, 3, and Zion-John, 1 1/2, and telling them tales of famous sports heroes, while husband and father Kris Slava, senior vice president of programming and production for the arts-and-culture cable network Ovation TV, will be the artsy parent.

When the family moved to Los Angeles from suburban New Jersey (and before that, New York) almost two years ago, Davis and Slava found a neighborhood where they could walk to most everything, but Davis finds she misses the East Coast and its weather, not to mention family. She imagines they'll be back in a few years , "like The Discovery Channel, which moved a lot of offices out here, but the rumor is that they're moving back," she said.

While she now does the occasional freelance project, in a few years she'll be back on the job market, but with a different concern, public interest rather than commercial broadcasting, perhaps doing PBS programs about issues of social justice.

Or, Davis says of Glenelg Country School, whose campus now reminds her of a small college, teaching someplace like that.

The now-stay-at-home-mom adds, "My friends and I say 'Damn those feminists!' when we feel guilty about not working."

Still, you can have it all, she agrees, just not all at once.

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