Mr. Gedreau

Mr. Gedreau runs the Costello Avenue Market, a small corner grocery on Costello Avenue in Derry where local children, including members of the Losers' Club, buy penny candy, soda, and other small items. The market is a familiar neighborhood fixture, a place where a boy like Ben Hanscom can trade in found bottles for candy and pocket change, and where Eddie Kaspbrak stops for a Pepsi and Payday candy bars on his way home from the Center Street Drug Store. Mr. Gedreau is known to the children as a grownup who enforces the ordinary rules of commerce and conduct, but his authority is tested and ultimately broken during a violent confrontation in the summer of 1958.

The Confrontation with Henry Bowers

On July 20, 1958, Eddie Kaspbrak, shaken by Mr. Keene's revelation that his asthma medicine is a placebo, walks out of the Costello Avenue Market to find Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Moose Sadler, and Patrick Hockstetter waiting for him. Henry immediately attacks Eddie, rubbing gravel into his face and threatening him. Mr. Gedreau, hearing the commotion, rushes out of the store in his long white apron and orders the boys to stop. He grabs Henry by the collar and yanks him off Eddie, standing toe-to-toe with the much larger boy, showing no fear because he is the grownup and Henry is the kid. For a moment, his adult authority seems to hold.

The Collapse of Adult Authority

Henry Bowers, however, does not back down. He shoves Mr. Gedreau hard, sending him flying backward to sit down heavily on the store's steps. When Mr. Gedreau begins to protest again, Henry's shadow falls on him, and the storekeeper finally sees the mad light in Henry's eyes. Mr. Gedreau scrambles up the stairs, stumbling on the second step, and at the top he turns and yells that he is calling the police. But when Henry makes a lunge toward him, Mr. Gedreau flinches back, and his authority is gone. Eddie, watching, realizes that there is no protection for him here; the grownup's power has been broken by a twelve-year-old boy's sheer, unhinged aggression. Mr. Gedreau retreats into his store, and Eddie is left to run for his life, a chase that ends with Henry breaking his arm.

Narrative Significance

Mr. Gedreau's failed intervention marks a critical moment in the Losers' Club's summer. It demonstrates that the conventional safeguards of the adult world—the storekeeper, the policeman, the parent—are no longer reliable against the force that is rising in Derry. Henry Bowers's defiance of Mr. Gedreau is not just a bully's act; it is a symptom of the town's deeper corruption, where the rules that normally protect children are being systematically dismantled. Mr. Gedreau himself, a minor figure who runs a small market, becomes a symbol of the ordinary decency that is powerless against the extraordinary evil that has taken hold of Derry. His store, a place of childhood transactions and small pleasures, is also the site where one of those childhoods is violently broken.