A song puts you in a certain place.
Those are the words of the late Art Laboe, the influential radio DJ credited with coining the phrase “oldies but goodies.”
“I think nostalgia is a very strong emotion for anybody,” he said in a 2010 interview.
The song we’re talking about is “Memories of El Monte,” and the place is one of Laboe’s favorite venues, El Monte Legion Stadium.
For a brief period in the 1950s it was the place to go for rock ‘n’ roll.
Now little remains of it but the lyrics of the song.
“If I could go back / To those days of the past / I’d show you a love / A love that would last / Oh, I remember those wonderful dances / In El Monte”
Friday, Aug. 9, marks the 50th anniversary of the building’s demolition. The date is two days after what would have been Laboe’s 99th birthday.
The hometown
El Monte Legion Stadium, dubbed the “Pink Elephant,” stood at 11151 Valley Blvd., a main artery in the San Gabriel Valley.
During its roughly 46 years in operation, it hosted everything from wrestling and roller derby to a stump speech by gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan in 1966.
But it’s best known as a place where teenagers from all over Southern California, of all races and classes, could blow off steam together.
It was constructed in 1927 as El Monte Union High School’s gymnasium and auditorium, costing roughly $80,000. The 160,000-square foot structure could hold 3,000 people and had a stage that was 100 feet long and 50 feet deep.
The high school was damaged in the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach earthquake of 1933. and was rebuilt a mile south on Tyler Avenue. The gym survived the quake and was purchased by American Legion Post 261 during World War II.
The first star to leave his mark on El Monte Legion Stadium was Cliffie Stone, a local DJ and talent scout for Capitol Records who is now in the County Music Hall of Fame.
Stone began putting on concerts at the stadium in 1948. They were what Art Laboe would later call “dance and show.” The concert would start at 8:30 p.m. with Stone’s 15-piece band and some country-western soloists. At 9:45 p.m., dancing would start.
ALSO SEE: These people appeared at El Monte Legion Stadium
His shows were broadcast as “Hometown Jamboree,” first on KXLA radio and later on KLAC-TV, which was Channel 13, and later on KTLA, which was and is Channel 5.
Regulars included teen star Molly Bee, who recorded “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” in 1952, and Tennessee Ernie Ford, a deep-voiced singer who recorded “Sixteen Tons” and would later become a big TV star. Early in his career, he took on a country hick persona and was called “the old pea picker.”
Country-western music suited El Monte after World War II. The city was settled by Midwest pioneers beginning in the 1850s and called itself “the end of the Santa Fe Trail.” In recent years, essayists in Chicano studies have called the city’s focus on White settlers erasure of its Mexican, Japanese, Black and Native American citizens.
“Hometown Jamboree” lasted until 1959, but the show moved from El Monte to Anaheim in the mid-’50s, making way for rock ‘n’ roll.
A melting pot
Art Laboe got his start as a radio host in the 1940s. By the 1950s he had fingers in several pies — radio, TV, concert promotion and record producing — all feeding into each other.
He is remembered for three things: creating a market for oldies but goodies, mastering the art of call-in dedications and putting on those teen shows in an era where rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t taken seriously or was seen as a corrupting influence.
“When rock ‘n’ roll came in, it was the kids’ music. It wasn’t their dad’s music. It wasn’t their mom’s music. And quite often it was the kids who told him about some of the records that were starting to bubble up,” said Joanna Morones, executive producer of the Art Laboe Connection, which is keeping his concerts and radio shows going after his death in 2022.
In interviews, Laboe said he began doing the El Monte dance-and-shows in 1957 because teen gatherings there weren’t regulated the way they were in Los Angeles.
ALSO SEE: Who’s who in ‘Memories of El Monte’
By then he had already made a name for himself doing live broadcasts from Scrivner’s Drive-In at the corner of Sunset and Cahuenga boulevards in Hollywood. He would spin records and chat with the kids who came to see him as well as pop stars such as Ricky Nelson.
El Monte Legion Stadium also had picked up a reputation for its dances, and it wasn’t all good.
In 1956, the City Council suspended the license of a promoter named Hal Zieger to hold dances at the stadium after a five-hour hearing attended by 600 teenagers and their parents. Under pressure, the council reversed itself a few days later, but with new rules, including no suggestive gyrations on stage, no leather jackets and no songs longer than seven minutes.
The reason given was to stop fighting and crime in the parking lot, but in a 2022 essay Alexis Paul Monroy alleges “the point of contention was the desegregated dance floor.”
“It was a difficult time as far as race went, but when they came to the Art Laboe show everybody got along. It really helped establish him as a figure in East L.A. and Los Angeles and Southern California,” Morones said.
Now El Monte embraces the legacy of Legion Hall, according to Mayor Jessica Ancona.
“It was a vibrant focal point for social gatherings and cultural expression, providing a sense of identity and pride for residents. The stadium was a melting pot where people from various backgrounds came together, fostering a sense of unity and shared experience,” she wrote in an email.
“For many in the community, the stadium was a place of firsts — first concerts, first dances, first dates — and these personal milestones have left an indelible mark on their collective memory. The music and events hosted there played a significant role in the lives of the youth, influencing their tastes and shaping the local culture.”
Memories are made of this
Laboe shared a lot of his memories with Morones, his assistant since 1995. In a phone interview, she described how a typical Saturday night at Legion Stadium might go.
“You might start out with a little bit of a dance where he’s playing songs that he made popular on the radio that the kids would request. That would happen for a half an hour, and then a live act would come on. The Penguins would come on. Depending on how many hits they had, it could be anywhere from one to five songs.Then they’d break for another dance. And then another hot artist he had scheduled that night.”
She said he was able to book artists just as they were about to become big stars, people like Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles.
Ritchie Valens, a teen-ager from Pacoima born Richard Valenzuela, was one of the best remembered artists to play Legion Stadium, according to Ancona. He was a rising star when he died in a 1959 plane crash with fellow performers Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson, aka the Big Bopper. It was dramatized in the 1987 film “La Bamba.”
“Art was one of the first to book him and one of the first to play him on the radio as well, from what I understand,” said Marones, who also recalled the time Laboe received an urgent phone call from Valens’ mother.
“The building is long, and then there was part of it that was like two or three stories. And the long part was where the shows were, and then the two or three stories was where the dressing rooms were. Art would be up in the dressing rooms with the artists and whatnot, and someone came in and said, ‘Art, Ritchie’s mom is on the phone.’ And the phone was at the other end of the long part, in the box office. There was only one phone, apparently, in the whole stadium.”
“So Art goes down, walks all the way across the venue, gets on the phone with his mom. And his mom is like, ‘Art, I just want to ask you, please, please, please, please tell Ritchie when the show’s over he has to go home. No hanging out with the girls.’
“Ritchie threw his head back and started laughing and smiling. Mom read him completely, I guess.”
“Memories of El Monte” became the title of a 1960 LP, a compilation of doo-wop and Chicano rock on Laboe’s label, Starla. Tracks range from Don & Dewey’s “Leavin’ It All Up to You” to Marvin & Johnny’s “Cherry Pie” and Chuck Higgins’ “Pachuko Hop.”
The album jacket shows Laboe standing on stage in front of a sea of happy teen-agers. In the front, fourth girl from the left, is 15-year-old Proxie Aguirre.
“I don’t wear that much makeup anymore,” she said in a phone interview from her El Monte apartment.
Aguirre has adored Art Laboe since at least the time she was a teenager in Venice and met him at Scrivner’s Drive-In the 1950s.
“My mother couldn’t keep me away. Nobody could. I loved going to El Monte. The dances were fabulous.”
Although crowded, she said the place was filled with happy faces, and there were never any fights.
“When you were dancing and bumping into each other, nobody got mad at anybody. We had a house full every, every Saturday night. It’s a wonder the fire department didn’t come in and close it down,” she said.
“It was packed all the time — packed. But you were able to dance. We had a lot of contests. You would do the Limbo Rock, the Mashed Potato, the Hully Gully, the Jerk. You would do everything. You knew that’s where you belonged. You had to be there that day.”
She remembers seeing the Penguins, Don Julian and the Meadowlands, the Medallions, Big Joe Turner, Ron Holden and Robert & Johnny.
When the LP came out, she said, “Look at me! I’m there!” And her mother told her she wore too much makeup.
The phrase “Memories of El Monte” proved to be almost as catchy as “oldies but goodies.” Budding musician and iconoclast Frank Zappa and Ray Collins, who would later become a band member in Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, thought it would make a good song and took it to Laboe, who suggested adding names of acts who performed for him in the lyrics, effectively creating a 2-minute-39-second infomercial. Recorded by Penguins’ vocalist Cleve Duncan, the single came out in 1963.
ALSO SEE: Who’s who in ‘Memories of El Monte’
By then, Legion Stadium was past its glory days. There would continue to be concerts by people like Zappa and Jerry Garcia with the Grateful Dead, but the upkeep was becoming too great. After it was bulldozed in August 1974, a U.S. Post Office was built on part of the property. In 2018, a row of townhouses called Union Walk opened on most of the rest of the land.
Sound waves
Much of the history of Legion Stadium has been passed down orally, people sharing what they remember or what they heard about years or decades later.
Aside from Art Laboe’s album jackets, few photos taken at his dances have shown up on the internet. Aguirre said they were not a good place to take cameras.
And things like newspaper articles, print ads, posters and ticket stubs who would tell you who played when are hard to find.
ALSO SEE: Where to find Art Laboe’s call-in radio shows
Part of that may be because of the way Laboe did business, promoting the dances on radio, according to Morones.
“His famous line was, ‘Be there Saturday night! See you Saturday night!’ He’d do these commercials. “Coming Saturday night to El Monte Legion Stadium! The Penguins! Don & Dewey!’”
He lined up talent in a similar way.
“Sometimes an act would say, ‘Art, am I going to be on the next show?’ “ He’d say, ‘Listen to the radio, and if your name is mentioned, then be there.”
And there were no tickets to tear. “It was, show up, get in line, pay your 50 cents or 25 cents or whatever it was and go in.”
El Monte is working on creating a mural to honor Legion Stadium, according to Ancona. It has received several renderings and looking for the right location for the tribute.
For now, if you go to the city you will find a few photos hanging on the walls of El Monte Historical Museum, 3150 Tyler Ave., and “El Monte Legion Stadium Nocturne,” public art by Vincent Ramos at the LA Metro El Monte Transit Station, 3501 Santa Anita Ave. It depicts Laboe and other promoters such as Johnny Otis, artists such as Rosie and the Originals, and members of the “Hometown Jamboree” gang.
There was briefly a tribute at Union Walk. When the townhouses were dedicated Laboe visited to receive a key to the city. There was a fountain on the site shaped like the 45s he used to spin. Artist Rebecca Niederlander interviewed him and rendered his words as soundwaves circling the basin with water trickling over them: “This is Art Laboe, and I sure hope that you all have as good a time as we had back in the day at El Monte Legion Stadium. See you there, Saturday night.”
At some point the fountain was filled with dirt and turned into a planter.
But the songs remain. Laboe’s radio shows are still on KDAY and other stations, with “Old School” Becky Lu reading dedications in his place.
“El Monte Stadium may not be here physically, but it’s definitely in the hearts of a lot our listeners who call in, who were there,” said Becky Lu. “They remember it like yesterday. And when those callers express those memories here on the show, you can still hear their passion and their love for the music.”
One of them is Proxie Aguirre. She calls in almost every night. Sometimes she dedicates “Memories of El Monte” to Art Laboe.
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