Dennis Dal Poggetto has run the July 3 Family Street Dance for 21 years
Published in the June 8 – 21, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Robert Airoldi
Photo courtesy Dennis Dal Poggetto
Freedom Fest volunteer and chair of the July 3 Family Street Dance, Dennis Dal Poggetto, address the crowd during a recent dance.
For the past 20 years, Dennis Dal Poggetto has organized the July 3 Family Street Dance in downtown Morgan Hill. It was a job he inherited in 1996 when he met resident Jennifer Tate. “She handed me a binder and said, ‘Here you go,’” he said with his characteristic aw-shucks grin.
Dal Poggetto — the 2015 Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year — has been the chairman of the street dance ever since that binder got in his hand. And now he is furiously getting ready for his 21st year as street dance chair next month.
If it had not been for a young woman he met on a July 3 at Lake Berryessa one summer in the early 1970s, he may have never found Morgan Hill. The woman, who would become his wife, lived in Morgan Hill and he made a trip from his Burlingame home to meet her here. On the way, his Corvette broke down in front of the M&H Tavern, the downtown Morgan Hill watering hole. Needing help, he called his girlfriend’s brother-in-law from a pay phone outside.
“There was nothing here back then,” he said. “It was quiet and peaceful.” The couple married in 1972, bought land in Holiday Lake Estates in 1975, built a home there and raised their two daughters: Amber, now 39 and living in Morgan Hill, and Heather, now 38 and living in Grants Pass, Ore.
Born in San Francisco, Dal Poggetto- who claims to be closer to 70 than 60 – attended Serra High School in San Mateo, then College of San Mateo and later San Jose State University. His college days took a detour when he moved to Hawaii to work at the Queen Kapalani, a new tourist hotel.
“My job was to take drinks to guests at the third-floor swimming pool,” he said. “That was a lot of fun.”
But his journey to the tropical paradise was short lived. After his brother enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1968, he returned home to where his family lived. He enrolled at SJSU, but never graduated, instead getting a job unloading freight cars and trucks for a company in Burlingame that dealt in soft goods.
A few years later, he got a job in the body shop at Courtesy Chevrolet where he worked until 1980 when he opened Morgan Hill Auto Body. He sold the shop in 1992 and spent parts of two years traveling to Ireland, England and America’s national parks. He even made a three-day cross-country trip in what he described as a “fast car.”
That need for speed came to him early. As a kid, he built go-carts and raced them on the street and school yards, often getting caught by local law enforcement. “In those days you got a slap on the hand,” he said. “I went to the 1963 Autorama and saw my first turbo-charged car and fell in love with speed.” He bought his first car that year, a 1946 two-door Ford. It was downhill from there. “I got my first Corvette in 1964 and I’ve owned them ever since,” he said.
With the travel bug out of his system, Dal Poggetto went to work as an estimator for a franchise auto body shop in 1994. In 2002 he bought out Dent Clinic and reopened a body shop and ran it until 2007, but sold it four years later.
“My daughter, Heather, was going to take over but she ended up getting married and moved to Oregon,” he said. “So I decided to retire.”
Now he buys and sells old cars, selling two so far this year. What’s an old car? “Anything that’s 30 years or older,” he said.
He recently found a 1961 Triumph that had been stored in a couple’s garage for 25 years. The car owner’s wife asked him jokingly, he thinks. “You want to save a marriage? Buy my husband’s car.”
“We made a deal and saved the marriage,” he said with a hearty laugh.
But perhaps his greatest joy is volunteering for the Freedom Fest, Morgan Hill’s annual patriotic celebration around the July 4 holiday. Twenty years ago, the Family Street Dance drew about 800 people, he said. It was held originally to throw a downtown party so people could get together and see generations of families. A lot of people who had moved away would return for the holiday weekend and look forward to the dance.
He has tried to ensure the annual street dance remains a family friendly event. It was moved several times, including a few years ago to the Downtown Amphitheater. It returned to the downtown core last year and now draws about 5,000 people.
“Now we see kids who were in high school 20 years ago return to reconnect with friends and classmates and to make new friends,” Dal Poggetto said. “I just fell in love with Morgan Hill. This town has been so good to me. It’s just a wonderful place to live.”
