1977 CC grad put his signature on Pasadena’s Rose Bowl

1977 CC grad put his signature on Pasadena’s Rose Bowl

Dennis Reeves remodeled stadium’s locker rooms

The last time the Hawkeyes made it to the Rose Bowl, Dennis Reeves received plenty of calls from his hometown inquiring about cheap — if not free — lodging.

“I still had friends living in Iowa at the time, and quite a few of them were coming up for the game,” said Reeves of when the Hawkeyes would lose to Washington to begin 1991.

Fifteen New Years later, Iowa is back in the Rose Bowl and will take on Stanford this Friday.

This time, Reeves’s phone hasn’t been ringing as much.

“Many of the people I knew have since moved out of the area,” said La Verne, Calif.-resident Reeves, who relocated to the West Coast two years after graduating from Charles City High School in 1977. “But I still have an open room if anyone needs one.”

Reeves’s company, Reeves Enterprises, did its best to make sure guests feel at home let alone the home team when it was awarded the bid to renovate and redesign the Rose Bowl locker rooms in 2011.

“We did both of them — home and visitors,” Reeves said of the project, which expanded each locker room to more than 30,000 square feet.

“We did all of the millwork,” said Reeves, whose company installed cherry-stained maple lockers for the players as well as the coaches.

“People call it woodwork … some even refer to it as cabinet making, but we and the people who do it call it millwork,” said Reeves, whose son Bradley now works with him and is a business partner. “We also did the surface and counters in the shower area.

“We’ve had bigger jobs, and we’ve done a lot work on the UCLA campus,” Reeves said. “You know how (UCLA basketball coach) John Wooden always talked about the ‘Pyramid of Success’? Well, we did the wooden pyramid displayed in his honor at Pauley Pavilion. We also reproduced Wooden’s den inside the UCLA Hall of Fame.

“But this about the Rose Bowl and, yeah, that’s one of our more high-profile projects.”

Reeves, whose sister attended Iowa, has attended several Rose Bowl games in his time.

“No, getting free Rose Bowl tickets wasn’t part of the contract, though I wouldn’t have minded if it were,” Reeves said. “It’s a great place to watch football … the layout is spectacular.”

Reeves remains a Hawkeyes fan. “When you’re talking football, what else to you got? Iowa State?” said Reeves, who after trying his hand at small-college basketball, bolted to the West Coast.

“I had enough of the cold weather.”

By John Burbridge sports@charlescitypress.com