Joey Dowdel Timeline and Summary

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• The book opens up with Joey Dowdel telling us (the readers) that he's much older now but has been thinking back to when he was a young boy and went to visit his Grandma Dowdel.
• The first summer that Joey and his younger sister, Mary Alice, go to stay with their Grandma Dowdel for a week, he's 9 years old.
• The town is pretty tiny, so Joey and Mary Alice decide to go to The Coffee Pot Cafe, where lots of the locals hang out. They hear plenty of gossip.
• One of the things that they hear about is how a degenerate drunk named Shotgun Cheatham has just died.
• When he talks to Grandma Dowdel about it, she's disgusted that the newspaper wants to write an obituary on him since they're probably just going to make fun of the hillbillies in this small town.
• So, when a reporter shows up, Joey is shocked to find that Grandma Dowdel starts lying up a storm about Shotgun Cheatham and how he was supposedly a Civil War hero—and then she takes it one step further and says that she's hosting his wake.
• Everyone shows up for the wake, and later that night, Joey sees the cloth over the casket move…and watches in horror as Grandma Dowdel jumps up with her rifle and fires some rounds into the casket.
• Joey saw that the movement actually came from a cat that crawled out the window, but from then on, everyone else in town (and the newspaper) remembers how Shotgun Cheatham came back to life during his wake—and was promptly shot by Grandma Dowdel.
• The next year, the kids go back for another week and, one night, hear the sound of an explosion coming from down the road.
• They rush outside to learn that someone has blown up Grandma's mailbox, and she just mutters that it was the Cowgills. Then, they learn that someone has blown up the outhouse belonging to Mrs. Wilcox, who is another town resident.
• Joey watches as Grandma Dowdel puts a dead mouse into her milk delivery and then confronts the boy who delivers the milk, a big kid named Ernie Cowgill.
• It's obvious to both Joey and Mary Alice that Grandma is lying when she tells the Cowgill boys (there's four of them) that she'll be out of town later, but they know that she's got some kind of scheme up her sleeve.
• That night, Grandma forces them to turn off all the lights and hide in the dark…waiting for someone to try to break into the house.
• Joey and Mary Alice watch as the Cowgill boys come in, and Grandma Dowdel rolls some cherry bombs to explode and startle them. Then, she points her rifle at all four Cowgill brothers and threatens them.
• Joey runs to the church to fetch Mr. and Mrs. Cowgill, who run on back to Grandma Dowdel's house and punish their sons.
• When Joey and Mary Alice return to Grandma Dowdel's the following year, many people have fallen on hard times thanks to the Great Depression.
• They follow her on an adventure in which she takes them onto private property and "borrows" the sheriff's boat in order to go fishing illegally.
• Then, they go to the house of an old lady named Aunt Puss, and Grandma Dowdel feeds her despite the fact that she's awfully mean.
• When they return to Grandma Dowdel's house, Joey and Mary Alice are bone-tired, but Grandma Dowdel puts them to work frying catfish and fixing up plates.
• The kids end up helping their grandmother feed all the vagrants that pass through town, even though the sheriff and his men do not approve.
• The next year, the kids are hanging out in Grandma Dowdel's kitchen when they see the banker's wife, Mrs. Weidenbach, come in and beg their grandmother to enter the county pie-baking contest.
• Over the next few days, Grandma Dowdel works Joey and Mary Alice hard as they refine her gooseberry pie recipe in the hopes of coming up with the winning pie.
• On the day of the contest, Joey gets really excited when he gets to the fair because he learns that all the contest winners will get a free ride in a plane—and he's obsessed with airplanes. He knows that if Grandma Dowdel wins, she'll give him her ride.
• Right before the contest happens, though, he spots Grandma Dowdel switching her pie secretly with the other good-looking gooseberry pie there. It's clear that she wants to use this other guy's pie to win…even if that's cheating.
• When the judging happens, though, Joey is devastated to learn that Grandma Dowdel comes in second place—and that her actual pie (the one she switched out) is the one that wins.
• He's surprised and thrilled, though, when Grandma Dowdel marches up to the pilot with a blue ribbon—the one from her hat—and claims that she won first prize, and that she wants her free airplane ride.
• Joey gets to take his plane ride, and it is completely awesome… and everything that he ever hoped for.
• The following year, Joey and Mary Alice stop by The Coffee Pot and see a girl named Vandalia being harassed and abused by her own mother.
• Later that day, Joey overhears something coming from Mary Alice's room that sounds like crying, but she claims that it's just a puppy she found.
• When it comes out that Vandalia is being hidden in Mary Alice's room and that she has a boyfriend named Junior Stubbs who wants to elope with her, Joey comes up with a plan.
• To help the couple escape, he pretends to be a ghost—distracting everyone in the town—while Vandalia and her true love board a train and get far, far away from their families.
• The next year, Joey and Mary Alice get off the train and find their grandmother already there. She's saying goodbye to her friend Mrs. Wilcox, who has lost her house to the bank and now has to go and live with her sister.
• Joey is a teenager now, so all he wants to do is take some driving lessons, which he can do if he somehow scrounges up $2.
• Grandma Dowdel tells Joey and Mary Alice to pull together some of the old items in the attic for the upcoming town rummage sale, and she brings out a stovepipe hat and a quilt—and then lies to everyone and says that they both belonged to Abraham Lincoln and were found in Effie Wilcox's house.
• Joey and Mary Alice go with Grandma to the bank where Mr. Weidenbach, the banker, confronts her about her lies.
• But somehow, Grandma Dowdel finagles him into giving Effie her house back and giving the kids $2 each—and so Joey gets to take his driving lessons.
• On the last summer that Joey goes to spend with Grandma Dowdel, the town's Centennial Celebration is underway.
• He goes with his grandmother to find this super old man to enter the Oldest Settler contest, and he watches with pride as Mary Alice—who's a teenager now—wins the talent contest with her ballroom dancing skills.
• When Joey and Mary Alice leave Grandma Dowdel, they discover a little kitten in their picnic basket while they're on the train…which means that Grandma Dowdel has left them with one last gift.
• At the end of the book, Joey talks about how he grew up and went to World War II, and that as he was on his way to training, he passed through his grandmother's town—and that they waved to each other as his train passed by.