A Juggling Mystery Solved After 43 Years (Finding Raymond Cloutier)

By Billy Prudhomme

I always say that the pinball of life bounces in a LOT of unexpected directions. This story is a prime example of that.

I learned how to juggle from a book that I bought in a mall bookstore during the week between Christmas and New Year’s in 1981. The book, Juggling For The Complete Klutz, came with three small beanbags, was quite funny, and had instructions for learning the basics of how to juggle.

That book, which pre-dated all of the “For Dummies” books by many years, taught thousands and thousands of people how to juggle. What motivated me to buy the book in the first place is a story for another time.

In September of 1982, I went to the Cajun Music Festival in Girard Park in my hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. I came across a juggler doing a street show. He had a BIG crowd. He was juggling 3 torches, doing a bunch of cool patterns that were way more advanced than just the basics. That torch routine was his big finish. I had missed almost all of his show.

Immediately afterwards, I went up to talk to him. I put $3.00 in his hat (the equivalent of $10.00 in today’s money) and asked him if I could try his juggling clubs, which were all-white, big American style plastic clubs. He even let me hold his unlit torches.

He said that his name was Raymond Cloutier, and that he was an engineering student from Knoxville, Tennessee. I told him that I had learned to juggle, but that I had no idea where I could buy decent props or how to learn more. He gave me two incredibly important pieces of information that day.

First, he told me about the IJA, the International Jugglers Association, which I had no idea existed. Then he told me to buy a book called The Art of Juggling by Ken Benge. He said that it was MUCH better than the Klutz book.

 

Back to business; he started gathering a crowd to do another show. This time, I saw the whole show. I watched in amazement as he drew a crowd using a fire devil stick, then did routines using balls, clubs, cigar boxes, and finally, torches. It looked to me like he was collecting a LOT of money afterwards, but that made perfect sense because he was very good. I can’t even remember if we said good-bye. But that meeting was monumentally important to me.

A couple of days later, I went back to the mall bookstore and asked them to special order The Art of Juggling for me. There was no way that it was already on their shelves. It arrived about a week later. Raymond was right. It was loaded with great instructions, from beginner to advanced level juggling, and covered lots of different props. The author also talked about how great an organization the IJA was. He had actually been President of the IJA at one time. The IJA mailing address was in it, too.

I immediately joined. Well, not immediately like you can today, because this was before the internet. In order to join, I had to call to find out how much a membership was, and then mail a letter with a check in it.

The IJA published a quarterly magazine called Jugglers World, and when my first issue arrived, it opened up the entire universe of juggling to me. It had ads from prop makers, feature articles on top professionals, a section on who was touring and where to see them, great photos of professional and hobbyist jugglers in action, lessons, and the names and locations of juggling groups all over the country, with contact information. I could barely believe my eyes.

I dove deeply into the lessons in The Art of Juggling. I practiced about two hours every weekday, and about six hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays. Eventually, I learned almost everything in the book.

One year later, I went back to the Cajun Music Festival and did my first ever street shows. I was not very good, but I made some money, and even though I was pretty terrified, I had a lot of fun.

A year after that, I went back again…and cleaned up. I wasn’t great, but I was better than just good. Besides, Girard Park was actually the place that I practiced every day for hours during that time. By then, it kind of felt like all those festival goers were on MY turf.

I never forgot that monumental day at the Cajun Music Festival when I met Raymond Cloutier, but I could never find him again. Even though the IJA published a roster of all the members, he wasn’t in it. Like I said before, this was way before internet access, so I couldn’t find him that way.

I looked for Raymond for many years. So many years, in fact, that I misremembered his first name and ended up searching for a “Robert” Cloutier. None of the jugglers I met over the decades had ever heard of him, so that was a dead end as well.

Recently, the universe aligned in some very unexpected ways, and I solved the mystery of whatever happened to Raymond Cloutier.

Two seemingly unrelated events came together in an unexpected way for everything to fall into place.

The first thing started way back in June of 2012.

Back then, I was reading a juggling e-newsletter, and in the “Notes” section, it mentioned that a 17-year-old juggler from Jacksonville, FL named David Ferman had set the world record for juggling 10 balls. I Googled him, and found an article from the Jacksonville newspaper that was about him and his juggling. In it, he mentioned that he really wanted to be a cruise ship juggler.

I called his father, Len, who also juggles, and left a voicemail saying that I was another juggler from Florida, that I was a cruise ship juggler who had been doing it for more than 20 years, and that I would be happy to tell David ANYTHING he wanted to know about being one. A few weeks later, I got a call from them.

One of the things that David told me was that the reason he started juggling in the first place was because he was picked as a volunteer in a comedy juggling show by a duo called Wilde and Haines during a family cruise on Royal Caribbean. Now, Wilde and Haines and I used to replace each other on ships ALL THE TIME. We were never on the same ship at the same time, so I didn’t actually know them. I just knew of them, and they certainly had to know who I was. I gave David some advice, and sent him a document I had written on everything I wish I had known about performing on ships when I first started out. He was very appreciative.

The next week, I was working a ship with a comic impressionist friend, Mike Wilson, and I told him the story of how this kid from Florida who started juggling because Wilde and Haines had picked him to help in their show, and how he had become an incredible, record-breaking juggler.

Mike told me that he was actually good friends with both Robert and Sean (Wilde and Haines). I told Mike that he just had to tell them about David, and how he had become such a great juggler. I left the ship at the end of that cruise and didn’t think anything more about it.

My wedding anniversary was coming up in a couple of days. My wife and I decided that since we had gotten married in Key West, we should drive down there from Fort Lauderdale, have a late lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, join the crowds on the pier watching the sunset, and catch the street performers in Mallory Square during the daily sunset celebration.

The weather was horrible at that time. I had no intention of driving all that way to walk around in the rain, and getting soaked, so we put off the trip until the next week. About a week later, we drove down to Key West, had a great lunch, and found a spot on the pier to watch the sunset. Two teenage boys rolling trunks walked up right next to where we were sitting. One of them pulled out seven balls, and proceeded to do one of the longest runs I’d ever seen (with tricks!).

I got up, walked the five steps over to him, and said, “Uh, you got a minute? That’s a REALLY solid seven ball pattern.”

He looked at me and said, “Billy Prudhomme?”

I said, “Yes!”

He said, “I’m David! We talked on the phone, and your friend told Wilde and Haines about me, and they contacted me, and we might make a documentary about them inspiring me to become a juggler!”

I was absolutely stunned. All of this had happened in less than a week since I’d left the ship. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how David (from Jacksonville) and I (from Fort Lauderdale), had randomly ended up together, right next to each other on the pier in Mallory Square in Key West; especially since I had planned to be there the week before. I also couldn’t figure out how he recognized me since we had only spoken on the phone.

David explained that he and his buddy Andrew, a juggler his age from Miami, had decided to get a really cheap hotel in Key West and do as many street shows as they could in a week, so they could get experience performing in front of live audiences.

He recognized me because he had Googled me after our phone call, and had seen my headshot, as well as my ball bouncing routine that some cruise passenger had posted online.

My wife and I watched David and Andrew do a show, which was a lot of fun, and then we just drove back to Fort Lauderdale.

Our being there at the same time was just unbelievable luck. Staying in touch with David over the years, who’s now an AI research scientist, turned out to be even luckier than I could have ever imagined.

The second thing goes back even further, to Nashville in the summer of 1989.

The summers in New Orleans were brutally hot. Almost all of the street acts would leave town for places that wouldn’t melt an audience right before their eyes.

My buddy Jody, who I had known since junior high, and who was one of only two other people in my hometown that I knew of who juggled, had researched festivals around the country during the summer, and found one in Nashville called Summer Lights. He called and found out that they would allow us to do street shows during the days it ran.

When we arrived, we found music stages all over downtown, along with food booths, and plenty of people just wandering around. We split up and found different spots to try our shows. People kept coming up to me after my shows and asking, “Are you Barry John?” I’d just say, “No.” Jody and I met up later, and I told him that people kept asking if I was Barry John, and he told me that they were asking him the same thing!

The next day, a guy rolling a prop case and a tall unicycle came up to us at the spot we found to be the best.

I said, “Are you Barry John?” and he said, “Yes!”

We both said, “Everybody’s looking for you!” All three of us did our shows on that spot, and had a blast doing them.

He explained that he was from Nashville and had performed at this festival for the previous several years, and even though he mostly worked on cruise ships, he still performed at Summer Lights if he happened to be home during the festival.

Barry and I became friends, and would see each other at juggling conventions. I started performing on cruise ships the following year, and eventually, we started replacing each other regularly on several ships. He moved to Miami to be closer to two of the biggest cruise ship ports in the world, the Port of Miami and Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. Later, when he had a wife and several kids, he moved to central Florida.

A few months ago, he messaged me that he had gotten together with two of the jugglers that had had a huge impact on him when he first started juggling. They both were really good jugglers, and both had become lawyers, but then had moved on to other jobs. He hadn’t seen them in 35 years, and their meeting turned out great. They all really enjoyed catching up and sharing stories.

It hit me that they had been in the Tennessee juggling scene in the late ‘70s and ‘80s and might have run into “Robert”, so I messaged Barry and asked if he or they knew a juggler named Robert Cloutier way back in the day. Barry didn’t, but he messaged both of them, and one wrote back that he remembered him! “Skinny red-headed kid from Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” was how he described him. I knew I was on the right track.

I hadn’t Googled him in several years, so I tried again. I got a hit.

Before the days when the IJA published the quarterly magazine Jugglers World, there was an IJA Newsletter. Among other things, it contained the roster of the names and addresses of all the IJA members at the time. In the years since I had last searched for him, somebody had posted one of those early Newsletters from the late ‘70s. Google brought me right to it, and in the roster was the name Raymond Cloutier from Oak Ridge, TN.

I remembered that Raymond had been going to college for engineering, so I searched LinkedIn, and I got a hit there. It turns out that Raymond Cloutier is the founder and CEO of a medical device company called NovApproach Spine in Alachua, Florida, just north of Gainesville. His education and age let me know that this was the guy, but there was no email address or phone number listed on his LinkedIn page.

My wife suggested that I check FaceBook, and although I figured that he wouldn’t be on Facebook, I did a search anyhow. His name came up! And it turned out that we had ONE friend in common. David Ferman!

So, on a Thursday afternoon in April, I messaged David and his Dad, Len (because I didn’t know how often David checked Messenger) and said that I REALLY needed him to contact me. Within an hour, Len had texted David to reach out to me and he did.

I asked David how on earth he knew Raymond Cloutier, a guy I had been searching for, on and off, for 43 years. David said that many years ago, he was doing a street show in Alachua, Florida (near Gainesville, where David was a college student) and that Raymond had come up to him afterwards and told him that he used to juggle and do street shows, too. Six years later, David and Raymond just happened to meet up at an industry conference. David was doing AI stuff, and Raymond was raising money for his medical device company. They even collaborated on an AI project for Raymond’s company.

I told David the story of how I had met Raymond, and he texted him and relayed the tale. David texted me back and said that since I had helped him get in contact with Wilde and Haines so long ago, it was his pleasure to finally reintroduce me to Raymond now.

We arranged a three-way Facetime meeting 3 days later, where we talked nonstop for almost an hour and a half, answering each other’s questions and telling stories of how this all came to be. All three of us could barely believe this actually happened.

Raymond mentioned that he had to be in Miami the very next Tuesday. I didn’t have a ship gig that week, so we arranged to meet in person.

I drove the two hours through Miami traffic to have dinner with Raymond at a seafood restaurant near his hotel. We ate some great seafood and talked for two and a half more hours about the many ups and downs that life had thrown our way in the decades since we first met.

He didn’t remember meeting me at first, which I figured he wouldn’t, but he certainly remembered the event, and that day. He said that on our Facetime call, the cobwebs had cleared a little and that he had a vague recollection of our original encounter.

I finally got an answer to something I had always wondered about. What on earth was he doing in Lafayette, Louisiana at the Cajun Music Festival in September of 1982? I mean, he was a college student in Knoxville, Tennessee at the time.  It turns out that he had an internship in Houston at NASA, and every 12 weeks he had to drive the 19 hours back and forth. He had been driving down Interstate 10 on his way back to Tennessee when he learned about the festival in Lafayette. Since he would be passing right through and had his juggling props with him, he decided to just stop and do some shows. Lucky for me.

One thing he asked me was what I thought would have happened to me if I had not run into him that day in the park. I told him that since I was so hungry for any information about juggling that I believe I would have eventually found my way to the IJA and all of its resources, but that I don’t know how long that would have taken. He definitely saved me a lot of time getting there.

I’m really glad that I was able to give him, in person, a great big “Thank You” for his kindness, and for his telling me such crucial information. It ended up sending me so deep into the world of juggling. I was also able to tell him that after almost 40 years as a full-time professional juggler, in my opinion, I still thought that he was a very good juggler.

And that’s how I found Raymond Cloutier after 43 years.

By the way, I STILL have my original copy of The Art Of Juggling. During the covid shut-down, I contacted the author, Ken Benge, and thanked him for putting out such an excellent book. I let him know that it was a huge part of my early juggling education. I got a nice email back from him a few weeks later. I was happy to hear that, after many years of his absence, Ken attended the 2025 IJA Festival in Evansville, Indiana.

At the age I am now, I realize that I have more behind me than I do in front of me, and for some reason, I feel the need to reconnect with many of the jugglers who helped me out so unselfishly when I was just starting out. I have been lucky enough to find several of them. Thanking them has meant a lot to me, and in some cases, it’s meant a lot to them. I know it has to Raymond because he told me that it did.

I highly recommend giving it a try.

Billy Prudhomme has been a full-time comedy juggler for 40 years.  “Sliding by on charm since 1986,” as he often says.  He started as a street act based in New Orleans, but performed around the U.S. and Europe as well.   He has been entertaining cruise ship audiences since October of 1990, and he lives in south Florida.  Want a more in-depth exploration of his career?  Dan Holzman’s “Drop Everything” Podcast – Episode 83 should do the trick.