I got it to work correctly. I made the changes described above as well as the following change on line 426 of DBEngine.class.php:
$query = "SELECT ru.resid, ru.memberid, ru.accept_code, l.fname, l.lname, r.start_date, r.end_date, r.starttime, r.endtime, res.name, eventtitle FROM
where my custom field is titled "eventtitle"
Hope this provides help to anybody else attempting to make these same changes.
Any ideas on where to start to change the display of events within the calendar? Instead of displaying the reservation owners name I want to display the event title. Any ideas?