Shady Ridge is a fictional location Pete has created for Old Joe Grady’s home town, perhaps based on the North Carolina town, Sandy Ridge. In Staying Alive in Bear Country, Pete describes his dad’s Shady Ridge general store as “shadowed in the evenings by the Smoky Mountains.”

Sandy Ridge is located about 215 miles, a three and a half hour drive to the Smokies.  (Map of location of Shady Ridge) It is, however, only 21 miles from Hanging Rock, a “park spans over 9,000 acres in the Sauratown Mountains and features over 48 miles of hiking trails. [1, 2]

Shady Ridge was once a textile community but as the industry moved overseas, the prosperity of these communities faded away.  Pete seems to have combined facets of small rural communities in the 1940s, both in North Carolina and in Virginia.  Miss Etta, the teacher at the Episcopal mission school, was actually a teacher in Callaway, Virginia’s Phoebe Needles school for the mountain children prior to public education being made available.