Tracking Down a Clown's Obituary, at the Request of my Barista
In New Orleans, you find the best and worst of everything, including clowns.
“This is going to sound weird,” my barista said.
I’d just shown him the book I was reading, Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which Thomas picked up at Beckham’s and slid my way.
“One of the best things I’ve ever read was a Picyaune obit,” my barista said. “I clipped it. I even gave a copy to my brother. But I lost it during Katrina. It was for this clown that worked in Jackson Square, how he had a special way with kids, how they loved him, but don’t get the wrong idea about that, and how he was always drunk and in trouble with the law. It just went on and on. It was unbelievable.”
To this day, he said, he can’t forget that obit. We agreed that the New York Times’s obits are lovely and polished, but only a Picayune reporter could’ve done justice with a truculent Jackson Square clown.
“I spend a lot of time in newspaper archives,” I told him. “I’ll try to find it for you. Do you remember when it ran?” Just prior to Katrina, he said. Early aughts.
When you are an archives nerd, that’s enough to go on. First, I tried newspapers.com. Nothing. Then I searched the Times-Picayune’s online obit archives. Nothing. Finally, I did a loose web search. And that’s when I found Perry David “Perri the Hobo” Rlickman.
Rlickman’s Picayune obit seems to have been scrubbed from nola.com. Ruthie the Duck Girl makes an appearance in Getting Off at Elysian Fields, along with Alan “Black Cat” LaCombe. But Jackson’s Square’s most notorious clown didn’t make the cut. In fact, the only place I could find the New Orleans obit was on Rlickman’s Find-a-Grave page.
In his day, he drew lots of attention, often for the wrong reasons. When Rlickman died in 2003, papers all over the country ran his Associated Press obit. Some wrote memorials of their own, including several newspapers in New England, where he summered to get away from the heat in New Orleans.
“Mr. Rlickman staked out a spot at the corner of Chartres and St. Peter streets, which he jealously guarded,” the Times-Picayune obit reads. “There, he honed an act that was mostly comic interaction with passers-by, but included making balloon animals for children and adults, whistling shrilly and performing an occasional magic trick.”
Just as my barista said, the obit detailed Perri’s crinimal history. The year after this video was filmed, NOLA’s finest arrested him “after they found 17 pounds of marijuana in his clown box.” Of his 20 years in New Orleans, seven and a half were spent in prison.
Rlickman grew up in West Virginia, the son of Holocaust survivors. He joined the Marines to escape the coal mines, and fought in the Vietnam War. He came home, got married, had kids. The family settled in Texas and Rlickman maintained a respectable engineering job.
Then, he took the family on a vacation to New Orleans. Walking through Jackson Square, he saw people busking and singing and miming and slinging tarot cards. He realized he could run away and join the circus — by being his own circus.
“That Halloween, Rlickman dressed up as a clown and won $400 at a local Houston bar,” the Harvard Crimson wrote in its obit. “Inspired with plans for a new life, he divorced his wife and moved to New Orleans in 1980.”
Perhaps Perri circa 1980 was less abrasive and offensive than the 2003 version described in his obits. According to those accounts, he worked Jackson — or Brattle, Harvard, or Lopes — Square, all day, seven days a week, unless it was raining. In New Orleans, he’d roll into French Quarter dives like Johnny White’s Sports Bar, still wearing clown makeup. He’d drink until he could barely talk or stand up, then get bumrushed off the premises. Sometimes he got banned for life. When he was drunk, which also happened during the day, Rlickman grabbed women’s butts, insulted gay people and made nasty, off-color comments to everyone but kids.
It’s telling that New Orleans, Boston, Cape Cod and Provincetown, generally liberal and tolerant cities, found Rlickman unbearable, including his “loud, piercing, annoying whistling that went on for hours.” He was banned in bars in all of those towns, and an attempt to ban him from the streets outright almost suceeded until Rlickman got the ACLU involved.
Some people, like his buddy Uncle Scam the political puppeteer, said Rlickman was misunderstood and argued for his integrity as a performer. “He was fine as far as I was concerned because he came out and worked,” Scam told The Harvard Crimson. “He did something no one else was doing... Most of your balloon guys sit there with a tank of air. Perri blew up his own balloons.”
A New Orleans photographer, after learning of Rlickman’s death, posted this pic of him “in full clown drag playing video poker with a bucket of quarters.
“There was something disturbingly funny about the scene,” he wrote. “The harshly lit bar reminded me of the inside of some Stephen King-inspired spacecraft, but the ballons in the doorway added an incongruous celebratory element. I thought to myself that all the scene needed was the guy holding a cigarette (and maybe a glass of Jack Daniels), with a hooker looking over his shoulder. At any rate, for whatever reason, the picture always gets laughs when I show it to friends.”
Every obit describes Rlickman as being gentle and kind to children, using his high-pitched whistling as a kind of secret language with them. Kids loved Perry Rlickman; adults either laughed nervously at his inappropriate weirdness, or despised him for being gross, rude, drunk and inappropriate.
There’s another New Orleans clown story that’s slipped down the memory hole — and this clown is Perri’s dramatic foil. When I did a search for “clown, New Orleans” in the newspaper archive, the first thing to pop up was a 1976 profile of Ruthie Chaddock.
Written by longtime New Orleans entertainment reporter Al Shea for The Orleans Guide, the story had a slight Perri the Hobo sexist vibe to it, with lots of emphasis on Chaddock’s looks.
“Luncheoners on the tranquil patio of the Court of Two Sisters restaurant would never realize the sunny, smiling, unaffected young girl enjoying a sensible green salad bowl with a glass of iced tea while bubbling forth good words about her fellow workers is actually a big fake," Shea began. This 22-year-old, he said, seemed like the kind of lady you’d find luxuriating in a fancy living room, asking “Tennis, anyone?” But no: Chaddock worked as a professional clown. "Ruthie, as she prefers, is a straightforward, healthy, seemingly uncomplicated girl...[she] has a flawless complexion, and away form the Big Top she wears no make-up,” Shea wrote. “She doesn't need it."
To Shea’s credit, he did ask questions that allowed Chaddock to explain her work with dignity and seriousness. While in college, she’d taught theater at a daycare, and when she saw a call for auditions for Ringling Clown College, decided to give it a try.
“Clown College gets thousands of applicants each year, and only about 50 are accepted,” she expained. “Then maybe 20 of those actually get to auditon for the circus. At Clown College, they taught us juggling, mime, make-up and the hsitory of the clown art. They gave us a respect for clowns. I was so lucky. Only about 3 or 4 graduates every get a chance to auditon for the circus. I was so thrilled when I made it.”
She graduated in 1974, immediately hitting the road with Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey, clocking 35 shows a season. Of the 19 clowns in the show, 16 were men and three were women.
“At first my parents were suspicious of circus life,” she said, “but when they got to know it as I do, I think they'd kill me if I ever left it."
A big part of clowning, she said, was creating your own particular makeup style. Once you create it, it's like s sports jersey number: “No other clown is allowed to ever use it. It is your signature.” And anyway, “clown make-up is jut an exaggeration of your natural expression. It usually takes me about 30 minutes to apply my makeup, and about 5 minutes ot take it off. Most of the clowns use Crisco to remove their makeup, but I use baby oil. I find that works far better for me.”
More important than not stealing another clown’s makeup style, she said, was following the eight commandments of The Code of The Clowns. (Let the record show Perri the Hobo violated every single commandment except for No. 7, “I will appear in as many clown shows as I possibly can.”)
“No clown smokes or drinks while in his makeup, or does anything that will discredit the art of the clown,” Chaddock said. “Clowns are great people. The older ones are so generous. If you show interest and respect fo the art, they will share any secret with you. I’ve been taught so much about what makes people laugh in the last 2 years. But if you don't take clowning seriously, you won't learn much from anybody in the show. Clowning is very serious business.”
The International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center, via Pat Cashin’s Clown Alley, riffs off a 1977 photo of Chaddock and fellow clown Peggy Williams, describing how Chaddock’s job at Clown College was making plaster casts of students’ faces so they could cast their own personalized rubber noses. After she stopped performing, Chaddock taught makeup at Clown College and worked as special projects coordiator for B&B. “Ruth has made a positive impact on thousands of lives throughout her long career,” CHFRC wrote. “The reason? EVERYBODY loves Ruthie Chaddock!”
I didn’t find an obituary for Ruthie Chaddock in the newspaper archive. That’s because she’s alive, maintaining a very active Facebook page. She’s still dedicated to her craft, supporting the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center and dedicating herself to helping other people, including raising money for a homeless man with a size 16 shoe.
If you want to see Chaddock, “the bestest clown makeup artist that ever was” attack a ringmaster with a giant powder puff, skip to the 49:00 mark in the video below:
Almost 40 years after this video was shot, and 20 years after Rlickman died in his basement apartment, people still love Ruthie Chaddock — and most of the world would just as soon forget Perri the Hobo. Blogger Mark Morris described him as “the real Krusty.” The antics Rlickman pulled in the ‘80s, ‘90s and aughts that made people sputterningly angry would be met with zero tolerance today.
Reading Rlickman’s many obits, though, something jumps out: blackout drinking, smoking copious amounts of pot and aggressive behavior are all classic symptoms of PTSD in veterans. No one really talks about what happened during Rlickman’s tour of Vietnam. It makes you wonder.
In 2003, two years after 9/11, people were well aware of post-combat PTSD — postal workers and Vietnam vets were invoked as archetypes of instability, often as a punchline. During the first few years after 9/11, droves of young people (and sometimes older people) enlisted in the military as the country smothered under an atmosphere of fear, paranoia and blind patriotism. You just didn’t talk about how a tour of duty can really mess up your head.
Post-combat mental health disorders are taken more seriously now. There’s a lot more support for veterans, including those who end up in the prison. What would’ve happened if those safety nets had been there for Perri the Hobo?
We’ll never know. And that’s the saddest part of this sad clown story.
The portraits, literary and photographic, of Rickman’s clown Perri the Hobo and of Chaddock’s unique makeup style really do establish their places and the place of NOLA in clown history and art history.
Your best one yet! In both writing and subject matter. You are the master.