It

by Stephen King

In Derry such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was almost an art, as Bill Denbrough would come to discover in the course of time.

George sifted through the junk on the shelf as fast as he could—old cans of Kiwi shoepolish and shoepolish rags, a broken kerosene lamp, two mostly empty bottles of Windex, an old flat can of Turtle wax. For some reason this can struck him, and he spent nearly thirty seconds looking at the turtle on the lid with a kind

hypnotic wonder.

Didn't realize the forshadowing of the turtle happened so early!

That turtle, George thought, going to the counter drawer where the matches were kept. Where did I see a turtle like that before?

I, Georgie, am Mr. Bob Gray, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

WHY DO I NOT REMEMBER HE SAID HIS NAME??????

“They float, ” it growled, “they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too—”

A special tram-car circled the historic sections of the town every hour on the hour and ended up at this gaudy and amiable money-machine. It was here that Adrian Mellon won the hat which would get him killed, the paper top-hat with the flower and the band which said I ♥ DERRY!

Derry was small, Derry was provincial, and Derry’s small gay community understood the shadow under which it existed quite well.

“It’s a bad place, ” Hagarty said. “It’s a sewer. You mean you two guys don’t know that? You two guys have lived here all of your lives and you don’t know that?

Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

GOOD

“The turtle couldn’t help us, ” he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look—that look of surprised musing—was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.

Another early turtle reference

Crazily, she thought: I would call the turtle, but the turtle couldn’t help us.

Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.

He was a man, for Christ’s sake, and a damned good one, not a furnace with a bad thermostat.

Shining reference?

I’m the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I’m the only one who stayed here in Derry.

I think what was here before is still here—the thing that was here in 1957 and 1958; the thing that was here in 1929 and in 1930 when the Black Spot was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency; the thing that was here in 1904 and 1905 and early 1906—at least until the Kitchener Ironworks exploded;

On Easter Sunday 1906 the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks, which stood where the brand-spanking-new Derry Mall now stands, held an Easter-egg hunt for “all the good children of Derry. ” The hunt took place in the huge Ironworks building. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered their time to stand guard and make sure no adventurous boy or girl decided to duck under the barriers and explore. Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the rest of the works. According to Buddinger, there was at least one child present for each of those eggs. They ran giggling and whooping and yelling through the Sunday-silent Ironworks, finding the eggs under the giant tipper-vats, inside the desk drawers of the foreman, balanced between the great rusty teeth of gearwheels, inside the molds on the third floor (in the old photographs these molds look like cupcake tins from some giant’s kitchen). Three generations of Kitcheners were there to watch the gay riot and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, which was to come at four o’clock, whether all the eggs had been found or not. The end actually came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three. That was when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before the sun went down. The final toll was a hundred and two. Eighty-eight of the dead were children. On the following Wednesday, while the city still lay in stunned silent contemplation of the tragedy, ...

This explains all the children in WtD's opening.