Generations of McHaweses walked through the halls of Herculaneum High School.
Now new generations of students in the Dunklin R-5 School District will be reminded of Dennis McHawes, one of the newest members of Herculaneum High’s Hall of Fame. McHawes, class of 1990, and Jacquiline Harrison, class of 1975, were both inducted into the HOF Jan. 10 in the high school’s new gymnasium that opened in September.
Dennis and Sheila McHawes graduated from Herculaneum one year apart in 1963-64. Their sons, Dennis and Donald, class of 1999, followed. Dennis married Gayla (Caldwell), class of 1992, and their son, Dennis, graduated in 2009, the last Blackcat from the family. Dennis and Gayla’s daughters, Marli and Madison, graduated a year apart in 2022-23 from Festus High.
“My dad actually served on the school board for many years,” Dennis said. “And he was the president (of the board). So his name is hanging on some of the plaques in some of the (school district’s) buildings.
Dennis learned of his selection to the HOF in November.
“It kind of left me speechless, and I’m usually not one to be at a loss for words. But it’s very humbling, you know, a great honor.”
Dennis McHawes is a Blackcat through and through. He played and was an assistant for football head coach Stan Helms. Dennis was a teammate of Dave Cook and Todd Medley. Cook was the head coach for the Herky football team from 2012 to 2017. Medley was the head boys track and field coach at Hillsboro High until returning to teach at Herculaneum in 2025.
“I look at some of the teachers whose names are on those walls. And I know how much they meant to the Herculaneum school district, growing up here, and it’s very humbling. My brother says, ‘You know, if Herculaneum school is here 100 years from now, your name is still going to be hanging in the hallways.’ I’m the first one from the class of 1990. It’s just such a great honor to be a part of it.”
When McHawes graduated in 1990, he entered the US Marine Corps and served in Operation Desert Storm. After he was honorably discharged from the Marines, he graduated from the police academy and served as a policeman for the Crystal City Police Department and deputy in the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department before being promoted to detective, where he worked for the St. Louis Area Major Case Squad. He currently works at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in St. Louis. He could not say in what capacity.
Along with being a combat veteran and veteran of police work, Dennis is a published author and a graduate of the New York Institute of Photography. He didn’t just patrol the sidelines as a player and coach at Herky, he also served as the school’s photographer.
As he sat on Herculaneum’s iconic stone bleachers inside the football stadium looking at the smoke stack from the shuttered Doe Run lead smelter plant, McHawes spoke with pride about what it meant to be in the HOF. Helms, class of 1965, was inducted into the Herculaneum HOF in 2010.
“Playing for Coach Helms back in the ’80s, I always joke and say, ‘You know, my freshman year was Stan’s first year as head coach. So we came to Herky together.’ The Stan Helms of the ’80s was one tough dude.
“These are lifelong memories, lifelong friends, you know, so many good memories right here on this field in the front of fans on Friday night. I can remember the Friday nights. You’d have people stacked 20 and 30 deep watching. The cars would be down each side of Joachim (Avenue) as far as you could see and just it was such a big, a big thing in the ’80s.
“I think it was because Herculaneum had always been kind of a generational school. There’s just generations of families that were here. So it built a sense of pride of being a Blackcat and growing up here as a young kid, you would look up to these older kids and they were superstars to you that played on Friday nights here or the basketball gym. You couldn’t wait until it was your turn. And once your time of playing was over, there was a pride of being a part of that, and you still support it. Being part of the black and red runs pretty deep.”
This wasn’t the first time Dennis McHawes was inducted into a HOF. A professional wrestler since 1994, McHawes goes by the name Attila Khan, and he’s also a member of the Midwest Independent Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Like many kids of his generation who grew up within the St. Louis TV broadcasting area in the 1970s and ’80s, McHawes loved watching Wrestling at the Chase on KPLR-TV Channel 11.
Pro wrestler Pat O’Conner was a friend of the McHawes family. O’Conner had been the American Wrestling Association and National Wrestling Alliance champion. It didn’t take long for Dennis to realize what his dream was to become a few years later.
“Pat takes me back in the locker room when I was a kid, and I got to meet Harley Race and Dusty Rhodes and a bunch of those guys. My dad took me to my first professional wrestling match in 1983. It was King Kong Brody versus Ric Flair in two out of three falls for the world title. And being such a huge Brody fan, I wanted to be a professional wrestler and after seeing Brody, you know, people asked, ‘When did you know you wanted to be a pro wrestler?’ When I saw Brody for the first time in real life. I said, ‘Man, this is it.’”
McHawes’ character, Khan, looks strikingly familiar to Brody.
When McHawes got out of the Marines, he said was going to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play when he saw a sign along the way there was a pro wrestling event at the Broadway Athletic Club. He went and the rest is history.
“I’m sitting in the audience, and I said, ‘I can do this.’ My dad’s like, ‘you’re crazy.’ And I said, ‘I might be crazy, but I can do this.’ I saw one of the wrestlers, and I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, my name’s Dennis McHawes, and I just got out of the Marines, and I want to be a professional wrestler.’ He says, ‘Well, you come to this location at this date and time, and we’ll start training.’”
McHawes said he started to gain notoriety as a wrestler by the mid-1990s traveling with circuits through St. Louis, Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee. He currently is part of Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling (SICW) and will be at Belle-Clair Fairgrounds Park in Belleville on Feb. 7 with tag team partner Mad Man Pondo against the Gateway Saints’ team of Sean Vincent and Jayson Breed.
McHawes said he wrestled for two of Race’s companies.
“Harley (who died in 2019) ended up being one of the best friends that I’ve ever had. And I miss him, dearly. I traveled all over and made some very close friends.”
After a lifetime of playing high school sports, being in law enforcement, going through the Marines and professional wrestling, McHawes’ body has seen its share of injuries. He said he’s had surgery on his shoulder and neck, but he’s not ready to give way to Father Time. McHawes said there was another wrestler in his circuit in his 60s.
“We travel together. We’ve been friends for 32 years. And I always tease him, I say, ‘Look, you can’t retire because if you retire, that makes me the oldest.’
“You know, when you walk out (into an arena) and there’s 25,000 screaming fans, you can see yourself up on the Jumbotron, you know it’s pretty good for a kid from Herculaneum.”