Remember El Baile Grande at the Civic Center?

Most of us would rather forget about Mondays.

Then again, most of us have no memory of El Baile Grande.

• Relive the memories with these LONG-LOST PHOTOS!

The women who flocked to the McAllen Civic Center in the latter half of the ‘60s remember. They remember how they prayed they'd be asked to dance. The men who stood across the room, who prayed they'd say yes - they remember, too.

Monday was the highlight of the week. In some ways, it was the highlight of a lifetime.

 "Back then, era una euphoria," said Carlos Guzman, who along with his band, Los Fabulosos Cuatro, played the conjunto music that ultimately became a rite of passage for many in the Rio Grande Valley.

The rush of the accordion, the rhythm of the bajo sexton and the words of the song amounted to more than simply a style of music -  these were the sounds of a way of life.

The brainchild of the legendary Paulino Bernal, El Baile Grande and similar dances in the region gave people not only a place to unwind but also helped push up-and-coming conjunto and tejano artists into the forefront. Bernal saw what these sorts of dances could do in Corpus Christi and decided to bring them farther south.

In addition to El Conjunto Bernal, El Baile Grande played host to Cha Cha Jimenez, Los Relampagos del Norte, Rene y Rene, Agustin Ramirez and Carlos Guzman and Los Fabulosos Cuatro. Many more have fallen out of memory.

What those who were there do recall was paying anywhere from 25 to 99 cents admission, or wearing the specified color of the night for a discount.

"Todos esperaban el lunes (everyone waited for Monday)," Guzman said. "Every venue was packed with people."

Musicians would plan their routes around El Baile Grande in McAllen but also make stops at El Blue Moon de Pharr and Vera's Palladium in Weslaco.

Each venue was a stepping stone, Guzman said.

Bernal hosted El Baile Grande through 1973, about the time he converted to Christianity. A year and half earlier he was in direct competition with a certain young promoter on the rise named Arnaldo "Nano" Ramirez. The son of Arnaldo "El Falcon" Ramirez Sr., who started Los Bailes Gigantes on Tuesday nights, Nano Ramirez rose to notoriety as the proprietor of La Villa Real, long one of the area's most pre-eminent venues.

He remembers the time when it was all about the dances and the accordion. He saw conjunto evolve from its beginnings, in acts like Freddy Gomez and Agustin Ramirez, through maturity in the Royal Jesters, Mexican Revolution, Jimmy Edwards and Latin Breed.

"The dances were the reason why I built La Villa Real," Ramirez said.

• May I have this dance...

Luisa Treviño still hangs on to her copy of Agustin Ramirez's El Cautivador album, which he autographed more than 30 years ago. She never guessed her love for those songs would lead to the love of her life.

As a young woman growing up in deep South Texas, music, mainly tejano/conjunto, meant the world. Dancing was her forte. Like many locals, Luisa and a group of friends would drive out to El Baile Grande in McAllen every week to hear some of the best: Cha Cha Jimenez; Little Joe y La Familia; Sunny and the Sunliners; and of course her favorite, Tony De La Rosa.

On one of those special Mondays when Agustin Ramirez was performing, she met Jesse, her future husband.

 "After the dance I would go talk to the musicians during their break," said Luisa, a native of Pharr. "We liked talking to them and they would take pictures with us. Too bad I didn't keep the pictures."

Thirty-eight years later, Luisa and Jesse pay homage to the era that so deeply defined them by visiting La Cocina in Alamo, which strives to keep the essence of true tejano/conjunto alive.

"It's still in my blood; it always will be," she said.

 -Luisa Treviño, Pharr

• Under the Blue Moon

Over the Christmas holiday break back in 1972, Elma Nora Duran went to a wedding at El Blue Moon in Pharr.

In those days the dance floor was divided by an invisible line: damas on one side, caballeros on the other.

"At the time her neighbors used to have a band, and my brother used to play with them," Elma Nora said. "When they had a booking we knew we were going dancing, because that was all of the entertaining they had."

This hall was a simple building on Business 83 in Pharr.

One young man kept coming back over and over again, asking to take her to dance. They struck up a conversation and it turned out they both attended school at PSJA.

The Christmas vacation stretched out over what seemed like a torturous amount of time. They knew that going back to school would allow them to see each other daily.

They realized they'd crossed paths every day for about four months, she getting out of gym class, he going in, and neither knowing the other existed until that day at the dance.

David Duran Jr. waited outside her classes everyday once school began again, and hasn't left her side since.

They dated all through  high school and at 21 were married.

Nearly 30 years later, Elma Nora and her husband still live in the same area.

What used to be El Blue Moon is now Kentucky Fried Chicken - but not in Elma Nora's eyes.

"We remember the place where we met more than 30 years ago," she said.

 - Elma Nora Duran, San Juan

•  ‘The best times of my life'

 When Jesse Gutierrez thinks about El Baile Grande he admits times have changed.

It was an era when men would have to "nombrar"' a young lady to get her on the dance floor, and people would forgo their weekend outings to save energy for Monday night dances.

"There were four or five of us, and at the time, we'd call each other and say, ‘You ready to go to the baile on Monday night?'" he said. "We had some good times but times aren't the same. Not at all."

During this era, when Paulino Bernal y Su Conjunto Bernal were the reigning kings of the genre, Gutierrez also became a big fan of Little Joe and the Latinaires (before they were Y La Familia), Rudy and the Reno Bops and later Freddie Martinez.

Gutierrez, 62, an Edcouch-Elsa native, recalls one particular dance where he witnessed a "mano-a-mano" - something like a battle of the bands - between Little Joe and Bernal.

"These were awesome dances. Awesome," he said. "This was the big thing. And everybody stayed until the end. A lot of us became dancers on Monday nights."

- Jesse Gutierrez (originally from Edcouch-Elsa, now living in Austin)