Want to get a picture of Cottage Grove, Ore., the place where Bill Grier spent most of his formative years, graduated high school and started his coaching career?

If you've seen the 1978 movie “Animal House,” you've seen Cottage Grove. It's where the climactic parade scene was filmed.

“It's a little town of about 7,000 (now about 9,000), primarily a logging community, with one little main drag where they filmed it,” Grier said. “They canceled school that day so we could all go down and watch them film it. Just about everybody in town went and I did, too.”

Grier said his younger sister can be picked out from the crowd in one flash sequence – “if you rewind and then go forward slowly enough.” But he didn't come close to getting on camera.

“I was across the street and down the block from where the guy (John Belushi's character) grabs the banner and swings down to the ground,” Grier recalled. “But I did have a good angle to watch the marching band go down the side street and into the wall.”

– HANK WESCH