Nina Jo Schmale

Nina was 19 when she announced to her family, “I'm going to nursing school.”

It was the early 1960s, before the flowering of the women's liberation movement, an era when it wasn't assumed that women would leave the house to work, and those who did had few choices. Teacher. Secretary. Stewardess. Nurse.

It took Nina a while to choose nurse. After graduating from Glenbard Township High School in Glen Ellyn in 1959, she worked as a secretary but didn't like it. She did, however, like her volunteer job at an elder care facility known as “the poor farm,” and she made friends with her patients, even brought them Christmas presents.

Her experience there whetted her interest in nursing. So did the fact that her brother, John, who was four years older, was studying to be a doctor.

John and Nina grew up on an acre of land near suburban Wheaton, a remnant of the Schmale family farm. Their father was a cement finisher descended from Germans. Their mother, of English and Czech stock, stayed at home to take care of her children. John and Nina walked together to the one-room Queen Bee schoolhouse, carrying tin lunch pails.

Years later, when Nina moved into the townhouse where she died, she installed an old “Schmale Rd” street sign in her bedroom.

Growing up, Nina — pronounced “Nigh-nah” — was a good student, well-liked, quiet but with a sense of humor. She loved Elvis, cats and the color pink.

“She wasn't the prom queen or the valedictorian,” her brother recalled. “She was kind of your average good kid who was really dedicated to being a caregiver.”

By the time Nina entered nursing school, she was three or four years older than most of her classmates and worried that she was over the hill. But she came with a coveted distinction: She had a car, and not just any car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible in pale yellow “Colonial Cream,” a gift from her father, who could barely afford it and who himself drove a run-down pickup truck.

In one of the slides that her brother recovered from the basement, a young man crouches next to the Bel Air, washing the whitewalls, smiling for the camera. He was the man Nina planned to marry — but only after graduation.

Marriage was prohibited for student nurses. So was pregnancy. Jewelry, makeup and nail polish were forbidden on duty. Nursing school, as one former student describes it, was like a cross between a convent and boot camp.

The student nurses' white and pale-gray uniforms had to be strictly starched, their crisp white caps perfectly placed — a tough trick on bouffant hair. No scuffs were allowed on their white saddle shoes.

During their first two years, all the nursing students were required to live in dorms attached to the hospital, but in their third and final year, in the hot Chicago summer of 1965, Nina and five others moved into one of the three townhouses the hospital rented on East 100th Street.

It was small and nothing fancy: One bathroom and three bedrooms upstairs. Some bunk beds, some singles. The first floor consisted of a living room, a powder room and a kitchen.

The close quarters helped turn most of the women into close friends, and for all their dedication and discipline, they loved pranks. In one of John Schmale's slides, Nina poses wearing nothing but a white towel and her nurse's cap, holding a hypodermic needle and pretending she's about to give one of her housemates a shot.

The kitchen was the townhouse social hub, a place where Nina and her roommates congregated to eat, study and listen to the record player from the nearby living room.

On one kitchen wall hung the only phone.

The kitchen door opened onto a narrow alley where Nina parked her Bel Air and where a hospital shuttle picked up and delivered students. It was that door that a student nurse from a neighboring townhouse approached at 12:15 a.m. on July 14, in search of bread for a late-night sandwich.

She rang the bell. No answer. She went home, not knowing that a little more than an hour earlier, a drifter with a knife, a gun and a history of violence had broken in and was holding her friends hostage upstairs. By the time he left, around 3:30 a.m., eight women were dead, some stabbed, some strangled, some both.

When John Schmale talks about what happened that night, he uses the words “anger,” “rage,” “mourning.”

He also uses the word “waste.”

What a waste that Nina and her friends weren't able to give the world everything they had to give, or enjoy its pleasures. He wonders what it would have been like to grow old with a sister, his sister. What would Nina, who died at 24, look like today, at 74?

He hates knowing that anyone who Googles the name “Nina Schmale” lands on the name “Richard Speck.”

That's why he and his wife established the Nina Jo Schmale Scholarship Fund at Wheaton College; Nina's name, and hers alone, is now attached to something good. It's why he wants a 50th anniversary commemoration that reclaims all the women's names, all their lives.

He has found another way as well to hang on to his sister's hopeful spirit. On some summer days, because it gives him a warm feeling he can't entirely explain, he drives around, top down, in a car he bought a few years ago. It's a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible painted in Colonial Cream.