1984

1984 was the year of the Canal Days Festival, a week-long celebration from July 15th to July 21st that marked the centenary of the Canal's opening, which had fully opened Derry to the lumber trade. The festival was a rousing success for the city's morale, image, and pocketbook, featuring a museum, band concerts, a carnival with rides by Smokey's Greater Shows, and a special tram-car circling historic sections of the town. It was at this carnival that Adrian Mellon won the paper top-hat with a flower and the band which said IDERRY, the hat that would get him killed. The festival officially ended with what one officer grimly thought of as the "Ritual sacrifice of Adrian Mellon" on the night of July 21st, when Mellon and his boyfriend Don Hagarty were attacked by three teenagers—John "Webby" Garton, Steven Dubay, and Christopher Unwin—after leaving the Falcon bar. The three boys beat Mellon, threw him over the Main Street Bridge into the Canal, and a clown in a silver suit with orange pompom buttons, later identified as Pennywise, was waiting underneath. Hagarty and Unwin both independently reported seeing the clown, who was holding balloons and dragged Mellon away, crushing his ribs. The murder of Adrian Mellon was the first of the "new murders" that Mike Hanlon would later use as the catalyst to call the Losers' Club back to Derry, as the similarities to the murder of George Denbrough in 1957 were unmistakable. The trial of Garton and Dubay for the murder took place in November 1984, and the clown was never mentioned in court. The year 1984 also saw the construction of the Derry Mall, which stood on the site of the defunct Kitchener Ironworks, a location of a previous cycle of violence. The mall was a collection of ugly buildings with signs for Sears, J. C. Penney, and other stores, and its construction represented the modern, commercial face of Derry, a stark contrast to the town's dark history. The destruction of the Derry Mall in a series of explosions on May 31st, 1985, was part of the catastrophic storm that accompanied the final battle with It, symbolizing the end of an era for the town. The year 1984 also saw the beginning of the out-migration from Derry, as people sensed the cycle of violence was starting again, a pattern that had occurred each time the cycle cranked up. The Derry News reported on the murders, but the story never broke nationally, a phenomenon Mike Hanlon attributed to It not wanting the attention. The year 1984 is thus a pivotal time in the novel, marking the return of the ancient evil and the beginning of the end for the town of Derry as it had been known.