Rawls, who first joined the Harvard philosophy department in 1962, taught until 1995, when he suffered the first of several major strokes.

He continued to work for three years after his first stroke. Since that time, Margaret Rawls and other colleagues have continued to compile and edit his partially competed works.

“He wasn’t just a moral philosopher, but a person of transcendent goodness, so good that he made you feel it was a privilege to be a contemporary of his,” said Thomas Nagel, university professor at New York University.

Perry David Rlickman

Perry David Rlickman, the balloon-tying, whistle-blowing, sometimes pushy and off-color clown known as “Perri the Hobo” who worked in Brattle Square the last two summers, died in late March. He was 51.

Rlickman’s body was found on March 22 in the basement room where he lived in Allston.

The engineer-turned-entertainer worked as a clown for more than two decades in New Orleans. But after he was jailed for drug possession in Louisiana, he came north in 2000. He lost his street performer’s permit in Provincetown, Mass. for his offensive antics, retaining the counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to win it back.

Then he came to Cambridge, arriving at Brattle Square every morning in a taxi cab and tying as many as 200 balloon animals and flowers each day.

He was known for his shrill whistle and for his sometimes-offensive gags, grabbing women’s rear ends and flirting with them, nastily telling off people who didn’t give him money and making fun of gays mercilessly.

“He crossed the line often but never crossed the line with someone who wouldn’t put up with it,” says Tom Newell, a fellow Brattle Square street performer. “He never walked up to a woman and grabbed her butt who didn’t smile. He read people well. He knew whose butt he could grab.”

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, he joined the Marine Corps after high school and served in Vietnam.

Marian H. Smith

Marian H. Smith ’04, a product of an upbringing that spanned continents and who drew unlikely personalities together through her warmth, vibrancy and love of different cultures, died in a suicide on Dec. 6, 2002. She was 19.