But very wise was he.

“That was him,” he says.

No Place for Perri

Rlickman was born in Bluefield, W. Va., in 1951, to a Jewish doctor and a musician who fled Germany during World War II. One of seven children, Rlickman joined the Marine Corps after high school and served in Vietnam.

He married in 1971, had two boys and went to work as an engineer in South Carolina and Houston. But the life of pushing paper and punching clocks didn’t agree with him. On a family trip to New Orleans in 1979, he noticed the street performers.

That Halloween, Rlickman dressed up as a clown and won $400 at a local Houston bar. Inspired with plans for a new life, he divorced his wife and moved to New Orleans in 1980.

New Orleans resident Rick Delaup first noticed Rlickman in the late 1980s, drawn to the rough demeanor and incessant whistle of the clown who performed in the French Quarter’s Jackson Square.

On Delaup’s website, Eccentric New Orleans, which features the city’s least conventional people and places, he has posted a lengthy profile of Rlickman, based on a series of interviews.

“He was unlike any clown that I ever knew,” Delaup says. “It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see him sitting at a bar with a beer in his hand in full clown makeup.”

Rlickman’s problems weren’t limited to alcohol. In 1991, he was arrested with 17 pounds of marijuana in his box of props.

Delaup says he was intrigued by the image of Rlickman blowing balloons for children in Jackson Square while selling drugs.

“I thought that was kind of an interesting contrast,” he says.

Rlickman served a total of seven-and-a-half years in jail on two separate drug incidents. After his final release, he and Delaup met for drinks about once every month.

Rlickman talked about his plans: he wanted to market himself more, maybe with his own postcards.

But the New Orleans heat made business slow during the summer. In an attempt to keep himself employed and out of trouble, Rlickman headed North.