After a divorce in her early 20s, Ms. Coburn raised her son and launched herself on a succession of careers. She died of Covid-19.
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
For many boys in junior high school in the early 1980s, social respectability demanded that you own the colorful swimwear known as board shorts, with logos from the brands Ocean Pacific or Jams World.
Gail Coburn, a legal secretary and single mother in Dallas back then, could not afford to buy her son, Dan, a wardrobe of expensive surfing attire. So she took him to a fabric store, where they picked out colors and materials. Ms. Coburn bought a manual for sewing patterns, and she made her own board shorts — with the logo “OP.”
Thanks to his mother, the boy wound up with more board shorts than anyone else he knew. The imitation OP brand “tricked everyone,” her son, Dan Ratcliff, said.
He said Ms. Coburn died on Feb. 21 at a hospital in Dallas at 71; the cause, complications of Covid-19.
Ms. Coburn had approached life with pluck from an early age. As a teenager in Purcell, Okla., in the mid-1960s, she took a waitressing job at a cafe near the University of Oklahoma in Norman and met a student named James Ratcliff. They married and moved to Dallas, his hometown.
After they divorced, in 1973, Ms. Coburn found herself without financial security, educational credentials or much work experience. She found jobs as a secretary and worked her way up to assistant director of human resources at Thompson and Knight, one of the oldest and largest law firms in Texas.
In the spring of 1990, however, she lost that job. Around the same time, she had a miscarriage. She decided to go back to school. In 1994, she received her master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas at Arlington and soon started a new career as a social worker at hospitals.
Ms. Coburn played in a women’s soccer league and developed what she called her “moose call,” something akin to Tarzan’s yodel, which she let loose after her team scored.
“It was an awful, guttural yell,” Mr. Ratcliff said. But it so amused another team in the league that they lured Ms. Coburn onto their squad.
Glenda Gail Underwood was born in Purcell on April 30, 1949. Her father, Glenn, ran a pool hall and then worked as a driller, akin to a foreman, on oil rigs. Her mother, Clarissa Mae Matthews, was a homemaker.
Purcell, a town of about 3,500 people, had its own rodeo ground. The imaginary games of Gail’s childhood involved cowboy hats and toy guns and pretending to ride horses.
Ms. Coburn attended the University of North Texas in Denton and was studying voice but dropped out after giving birth to Dan. On weekend drives from Dallas to Purcell to visit her family, she taught her son the difference between melody and harmony, and the two often sang Elvis Presley songs together.
For a stretch in her 20s and 30s she worked at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, modeling clothes and doing odd jobs. One job was chauffeuring V.I.P.s in golf carts, and in 1987 she met a fellow driver, Bill Coburn. They married at a theater on the fairgrounds the next year.
After Ms. Coburn obtained her master’s degree, the couple traveled across the country for work. Ms. Coburn moved back to Dallas in 2011 to open a private practice as a therapist and to spend time with her three grandchildren. In addition to Mr. Ratcliff, they survive her, along with Mr. Coburn and a sister, Valorie Sanders.
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