04/06/2026
Esther Lee Shamburger was born April 6, 1904 in Wood County Texas. Her parents, Robert Lee Shamberger and Julia Ida Jackson had gotten married in Marshall, TX on February 8, 1903.
The family returned to Marshall in 1911 where Robert worked as a clerk for Perkins Brothers and Julia was operating the Shamburger Select School out of their home at 704 West Rusk. She taught shorthand, bookkeeping, and touch typewriting for $10 a course. The first class had 6 students.
Pictured here is their daughter Esther at around age 10. She learned to type at an early age on a green Oliver Standard Visible Writer typewriter No. 9, patented in 1912. This typewriter is on exhibit at the Harrison County Historical Museum in Room 120 in the Turn of the Century: Going Places exhibit.
Younger Esther could type 100 words per minute at age 9 and would often put on demonstrations, sometimes in the Joe Weisman & Co. storefront window, to advertise her mother’s business classes. By 1915, the classes were increasingly well known and Julia had begun publishing her own class books. In 1915 the family moved to Dallas and started Shamburger’s Select Business School.
The Shamburgers were once on the cutting edge of business education, reaching students throughout Texas and as far away as California. They taught shorthand, touch typing, English, spelling, court reporting, business correspondence, legal forms, punctuation, secretarial duties, office training, tabulating, care of business machines, bookkeeping, commercial law, business writing, finger drills, comptometer, and Dictaphone. Their students worked in many fields, as secretaries, office managers, stenographers, bookkeepers, court reporters, and legal aides.
The Shamburgers were able to guarantee their students a position upon graduation, due to their connections to a vast network of business professionals and their excellent reputation in the field. Testimonials for their teaching methods and the quality of their students filled a three-ring scrapbook and were written by such well-known Texans as United States District Judge T. Whitfield Davidson, Baylor professor J. F. Kimball, and Pastor George W Truett.
The family, including Esther, continued teaching until 1950. Robert and Julia Shamburger passed away in 1953 and 1952 respectively. Esther married Basil Lee Davis and lived in Dallas until 1987.
