President and Owner Anita Spurger
By WORDSMITH STUDIOS
Anita Spurger is the kind of person that gets noticed. Perhaps it’s her infectious energy, her warm personality, her striking appearance, or maybe a combination of traits.
Whatever the case, there’s just something that draws people to her and makes her well suited to a career in businesses that are heavy on personal interaction.
"I graduated high school and had planned to be a teacher," she said. "Then my dad showed me a brochure for court reporting. I didn’t know what a court reporter was, what a deposition was, didn’t know any of it. I’d never seen a steno machine. But it all started to fall into place and made sense."
It’s fell into place so well that she now has her own court-reporting business, Spurger Reporting Services.
A significant component in Anita’s success is the warmth of her personality and her ability to interact easily with people, characteristics whose roots are found in her family background. The Spurgers are a remarkably close group.
Where so many seek to escape their relatives, the maternal and paternal sides of Anita’s family traveled literally half-way around the world to be together, overcoming cultural differences, language barriers, and a war to come together in the United States.
That cultural mix shows in Anita’s exotic appearance, a combination of the southern United States and Southeast Asia. Her father, originally from Alabama, served in the U.S. Army in Viet Nam, where he met and married Anita’s mother. The couple had a son, Robert, and moved to the United States, where three daughters were born: Belinda, Anita, and Kim. Anita was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived there until age eight when her parents moved to Dallas. By the early 1990s, the rest of Anita’s mother’s family had moved to America, and now the whole Spurger clan now resides in the Dallas area.
"Now everybody’s here," Anita said.
"When my mother came here she knew no one and didn’t know the language, and was really dependent on my dad and his family. But she picked up customs really well. I don’t know if she had any idea what was in store for her, but she fits right in now."
So how much Vietnamese culture does Anita possess?
"Slim to none," she says with a grin. "I took a course in Vietnamese at Richland (junior college), because I can’t communicate with my grandparents. But that language is the hardest thing to learn."
Fortunately, Anita has translators, including her youngest sister, Kim, who speaks Vietnamese. But the family’s cultural mix hasn’t stopped. Robert’s wife is Filipino and her sister Belinda’s husband is Hispanic.
"We’re all within five miles of each other," Anita said. "Every Sunday the family gets together, we eat, hang out, play poker, and catch up. We’re a really tight group."
Family support played a role in launching – and directing – Anita’s professional life. After high school, Anita entered court reporting school and was doing well with the curriculum when she suddenly had a drastic change of heart.
"A friend and I decided we didn’t want to do this and we were going to join the Army,” she said. “We skipped school one day and went to the recruiting office and took the entrance exams."
What stopped her?
"We didn’t weigh enough. The recruiter sent us home and told us to eat red meat and potatoes. We were fresh out of high school, little bitty girls. So they wouldn’t take us.
"By the time I made it home that night, the recruiter had called the house, and my dad decided I was not going into the Army."
Not trading her steno machine for an M-16 was a wise choice. While the Army might have enjoyed her work ethic, her natural independence might not have been so welcome. But it has served her well in a business where success depends on initiative.
"It depends on how much you want to work," Anita explained. "It’s not necessarily a matter of experience. How much you make and how well you do depend on how fast you turn your work, how efficient you are, and how much you want to work."
