From John Goodall

family photo Peg Coburn (right), head of the wardrobe department for the Great Circus Parade, outfitted Tova Borgnine as a ringmaster. All the elephants have different-shaped heads, and then there's the matter of their ears. The Asian elephants have smaller ears, while the African elephants have long floppy ears and narrower heads. The good news is, the elephants are generally cooperative, Peg Coburn found. So are the horses. The camels could be tricky. "Their knees go in every direction, and they aren't as even-tempered as elephants and horses are," Kathy Nelson said of her mother's experience as head of the wardrobe department for the Great Circus Parade. In 11 years on the job, Coburn dressed humans, too — the kings and queens of France and England, Cleopatra and Cinderella, Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, assorted knights, jesters, maidens and damsels, a Cossack band. She worked with Ernest Borgnine, the late circus-loving actor who appeared as a clown (he brought his own costume). Coburn outfitted his wife, Tova, as a ringmaster. Coburn, who oversaw miles of gold braid, silver trim and acres of shimmering fabric, died of complications of Alzheimer's disease June 26 at a Wauwatosa hospice. She was 83. The lady who dressed the circus parade started life as Margaret Moore in Lexington, Ky. Her mother was an elementary school teacher, and her father was a farmer. She was talented in art and took up sewing at an early age. She studied art for two years at theUniversity of Kentucky in Lexington, where she met her future husband, Garmon E. Coburn. They married in 1951 and moved to Washington, where he had a job at the Pentagon. Coburn got a job at the Pentagon, too. She did drawings and renderings for presentation to Congress during the Korean conflict. "They were hand-drawn. That stuff didn't come out of a computer in those days," said Nelson, of Wauwatosa. Coburn worked for the Pentagon for four or five years, then took off time to raise her family in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her three children all took dance lessons and eventually became professional dancers. The studio where they studied needed costumes sewn, so Coburn took on the sewing. "It helped pay for our classes," Nelson said. By 1975, Coburn was wardrobe manager at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus World theme park near Orlando, Fla. It was there that she got to know Chappie Fox, the one-time director of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo — who, with the late Milwaukee public relations executive Ben Barkin, would bring the Great Circus Parade back to Milwaukee. Fox and Coburn struck up a friendship while he worked for the theme park. When the circus parade returned to Milwaukee, he and Barkin knew they needed someone skilled to handle wardrobe. Fox thought of Coburn. In 1985, she moved to Baraboo to take on the job. The last parade had been 12 years earlier, and there hadn't really been a wardrobe department during that time, Coburn noted. Many costumes lent by the museum for the parade needed repair. Most would gradually be replaced. Fitting the animals properly was critical. "She had a respect for the animals, and every animal was different," her daughter said. "You don't want anything to cover their eyes, you don't want anything to annoy them, you don't want anything to hurt them." She began by making paper patterns for headpieces worn by elephants and other animals. Then she made the pattern in muslin. Over the years, she made observations about animal behavior: The laid-back elephants sometimes like to lie down during a fitting, she said in a 1995 interview, though she preferred that they stand. They are easily outfitted, she said, as long as you are careful around their tender ears. "Elephants will eat the tassels off the costumes if you don't watch them," she said, "and camels kind of slobber and spit." Horses don't appreciate anything flicking around their ears. It eats away at them, she said, and they respond in kind. By August each year, the dust barely settled from the parade, Coburn was at work, doing historic research for new units to present to the board for approval. She designed outfits with concealed built-in "gives" of elastic, so they could be adjusted rather than altered from year to year. "I can't stand to see costumes ripped apart," Coburn once said. She was clear about the look she wanted, too. "In a parade, the color has to look rich, vibrant and alive," she said. Her proudest accomplishment came in 1987 with a unit called the Field of the Cloth of Gold spectacle, based on a summit that took place in 1520 between King Henry VIII of England and King Francois of France. For more than a decade, Coburn worked on the parade but never saw it pass by. That finally happened after she retired in 1996. Fox and Barkin invited her to sit in the viewing stand. "We sat and watched the parade for the first time," her daughter said. "The parade was her pride and joy. To actually hear the oohs and ahhs from people watching the parade ... I think she was pleased to see everything go by, but she was a perfectionist. She would see a button undone, a shirt untucked. If a hat was pushed back too far, she noticed. "She was never one to just be satisfied." Besides her daughter, Coburn is survived by a son, Gary Coburn; a brother, Keith Moore; a sister, Patricia Carter, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. A son, Keith Coburn, died in 2008.