Statue of Paul Bunyan

The Statue of Paul Bunyan is a twenty-foot-tall plastic monument that stood on the lawn of City Center in Derry, Maine, at the intersection of Outer Canal Street and Main Street. Erected in 1956 and unveiled on May 13, 1957, during the incorporated township's one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday celebration, the statue depicted the mythical lumberjack in bib overalls and a red-and-white-checked shirt, with a plastic axe slung over one shoulder and an eternal optimistic grin. The statue was hotly debated in the Derry News letters column, with the high school art teacher threatening to blow it up, but it was purchased and installed nonetheless, becoming a garish landmark that children delighted in climbing over while adults watched with mixed apprehension and amusement.

Childhood Terror and the Living Statue

For Richie Tozier, the statue became the site of a terrifying encounter in March 1958, when he was eleven years old. After eluding Henry Bowers and his friends in the toy department of Freese's Department Store, Richie sat on a bench near the statue, exhausted. As he drowsed in the afternoon sun, the plastic Paul Bunyan bent down, its face transforming into a low, beetling forehead, bloodshot eyes, and a grin that revealed gigantic yellow teeth. The giant demanded that Richie return "my hen and my harp and my bags of gold" and raised its axe to split him down the middle. Richie rolled off the bench just as the axe sheared the bench in two, then scrambled away as the giant pursued him. When he finally looked back, the statue was back on its pedestal, the bench intact, and the gravel unmarked. Richie dismissed the incident as a dream, but the memory resurfaced decades later when he returned to Derry.

The Return and the Final Confrontation

On May 30, 1985, after Mike Hanlon's phone call brought the Losers' Club back to Derry, Richie walked past City Center and saw the statue again. The marquee of City Center now displayed a hallucinatory message advertising "The Richie Tozier 'All-Dead' Rock Show" with deceased musicians. As Richie watched, the Paul Bunyan statue transformed into a twenty-foot-tall Day-Glo clown, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff, with orange pompom buttons and a huge bunch of plastic balloons engraved with legends like "IT'S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME" and "RICHIE TOZIER'S 'ALL-DEAD' ROCK SHOW." The clown taunted Richie, threatening to give him prostate cancer or a brain tumor, and Richie responded with a defiant, self-parodying voice that made the clown recoil. The statue then briefly became a twenty-foot-tall plastic Buddy Holly wearing a button reading "RICHIE TOZIER'S 'ALL-DEAD' ROCK SHOW," with one bow of his glasses mended with adhesive tape, before reverting to Paul Bunyan.

Destruction and Aftermath

During the catastrophic storm of May 31, 1985, at approximately 10:00 A.M., the Statue of Paul Bunyan exploded. The bearded grinning head rose straight up in the air, one leg kicked forward and the other back as if the statue had attempted a split so enthusiastic it resulted in dismemberment. The midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel, and the head of the plastic axe rose into the rainy sky, twirling end over end before shearing through the roof and floor of the Kissing Bridge. The destruction of the statue coincided with the collapse of downtown Derry into the Canal, the backsurge of the Kenduskeag, and the end of the 27-year cycle of violence that had plagued the town. The statue's obliteration marked the final dissolution of the physical landmarks of Richie's childhood terror and the symbolic end of It's power over Derry.