Compared to Cape May at its south and Atlantic City at its north, the borough of Wildwood was the new kid on the block when the calendar turned to the new century on January 1, 1900.

Cape May, then known as Cape Island, was the granddaddy of them all, having been officially incorporated as a borough in 1851. Atlantic City was incorporated three years later in 1854 and Wildwood didn’t join them as an official borough until 1895 and as a city until 1912 when it merged with Holly Beach.

As unlikely as it seems, at a time long before bikinis and thongs, there was a connection between the railroad and bathing suits in the Wildwoods and at other beach resorts.

A history of beach attire in the United States claims that before the trains were widespread, and when accessibility to the beaches was limited, the few people who were there had no problem finding the privacy of secluded spots to soak the sun or swim in the water while they were naked.

The nation was changing in lifestyle and culture during the 1920s. Prominent on the scene and often behind it were flappers, speakeasies, bootleggers, movies and what some people considered a general decline in the nation’s morals.

Seeing the need to be informed while envisioning the future, a few early settlers of the Wildwoods found some printing presses and started newspapers even before Wildwood was officially incorporated as a borough in 1895.

The death of Dick Clark last week has revived memories of a time in dance history when Clark played a role in changing the scene in Wildwood, and around the country.

Like others who started their careers in Philadelphia and nurtured them at the seashore, Clark came to Wildwood and did his act in 1957 and 1960 at the boardwalk’s famous Starlight Ballroom. The elders of those times wondered what his act was, however. He did not sing like Frank Sinatra or dance like Fred Astaire or tell jokes like Bob Hope. He just stood there, made comments and played records while kids danced or watched. Whatever was the reason for his success, it made the less successful among the older people think that perhaps they had missed their calling.

The colorful career of Eddie Morton has been mostly forgotten in Wildwood.

In his 68 years that took him to the Great Depression, Morton worked as a cop on the Philadelphia streets, then turned to songwriting and song plugging, moved on to share the vaudeville bill with some of the headliners of his time and finally settled in Wildwood as a restaurateur and community activist.

The success of a seashore resort does not depend on whether it has a commercial pier that stretches into the ocean. But it helps.

The history of the piers in the Wildwoods, as well as in other South Jersey oceanfront communities, is a contradictory example of how piers have or have not influenced tourism there, especially in the borough of Wildwood Crest.

Louis Yollin was given the day off from his designated domicile at a Philadelphia mental institution on May 19, 1952. Then he celebrated his liberty by shooting up much of South Jersey including three North Wildwood women, one of them the sister of its mayor.

The year of 1914 was a good one for the island known as Five Mile Beach, especially for the centerpiece resort named Wildwood. That city, which two years earlier had accepted Holly Beach into its community, now had its own congressman, the first and only one in the Wildwoods history, in the person of J. Thompson Baker, one of three brothers who “discovered” much of the island.

Almost since its beginning in April 1885 when Holly Beach became the first officially incorporated municipality on the island, the local hot button issue of discussion has been whether the towns should all get their acts together and become one.

Occasionally during the early history of the Wildwoods there have been stories of abandoned horses, cows, pigs and other farm life running wild on the island and being fired upon by a mayor who also happened to be a butcher. It happened at a time when the few people there acknowledged the island’s virtues and potentials but were still trying to get it all together for the future.

Its climate has often been cited in the history of the Wildwoods as one of the reasons for the island’s popularity. Tourism officials, then called members of the Board of Trade, and the island’s mayors have long boosted Five Mile Beach as the place to be while harsh winds blow elsewhere or the hot sun beats down on city sidewalks.

Although formal police forces were virtually nonexistent in the early days of the Wildwoods, the realization was to come in the middle of the first decade of the 1900s that the new municipalities needed more than marshals riding around on horses like something out of a Zane Grey novel.

The early reported history of Wildwood’s lifestyle has raised the issue of whether its residents were more concerned about fires than they were about criminals.

In historian George F . Boyer’s book, “Wildwood, Middle of the Island,” which covers from 1885, the official beginning of the island, until 1915, the author devotes many pages, some emerging into chapter titles, about the fire departments on the burgeoning island. There are only occasional references, some barely in a few lines, to the emergence of the police departments.

While three brothers were making history at the southern part of the island that is now known as Wildwood, a father and son five miles to the north were doing their share to bring the same success to where they lived, which was once a fishing village.

Arguments about the pros and cons of beach fees in Wildwood have been as much a part of its history as parking meters, the boardwalk and roller coasters. Its residents and those who come here and then go home have been talking about whether beach fees are to be or not to be for almost half a century, since Ocean City became the first in the county to make it happen in 1976, the year the United States celebrated its 200th anniversary.

The hottest entertainment period in Wildwood’s history, the era of the 1950s and the ’60s which some writers have compared to Las Vegas, has produced memories in writings and orally for the audiences who were there and especially for the stars who performed on the stages of the resort’s nightclubs.

Everything seemed to be going well in the life of Emma McKeown when the young mother left her bed on the Friday morning of March 2, 1923 at the boarding house she owned with her husband at 148 East Schellenger Ave. in Wildwood.

It was a good sign for the summer that even though the tourism season was still months away, their boarding house named The Fremont was occupied so early in the year by a few tenants.

When tourists arrive at their vacation resorts, seldom if ever do they delve into the history of their home away from home and the movers and shakers who made it happen. After all, as in the case of the Wildwoods, they come here not for a lesson in local history, but to enjoy the ocean, the beach, the boardwalk, the thrill rides and the other seashore attractions.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Those famous words were written by William Shakespeare for his character Juliet to speak in act two of the play, “Romeo and Juliet.”

Some in North Wildwood might have disagreed or concurred if the Bard of Avon had written those same words a little more than just a century ago or even as recently as two decades ago. On May 16, 1906, the mayor and council, over the objection of the postmaster, changed the name of Anglesea to North Wildwood so it could join the other Wildwood names on the island. Jason Buck, who doubled as councilman and postmaster, objected to the switch because it meant he would have to change too the signs at the post office.