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.

Only a few big name headliners who have played the bygone Wildwood circuit are still alive. Tony Bennett, who is 86, played the Bolero Supper Club, at Oak and Atlantic Avenues in 1954 and during later appearances was to credit Wildwood with having been the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll, a statement that may be challenged by others. Bennett still performs in Atlantic City and is seen on young-oriented TV programs, apparently to satisfy the senior citizens, especially on New Year’s Eve when they wonder whatever happened to Guy Lombardo.

Jerry Lewis, a New Jersey product, is also 86 and played Wildwood’s Manor Supper Club for a one week run in the second half of the 1950s, soon after he and Dean Martin broke up their act on July 24, 1956. Aging has caught up with Lewis and he makes few show business appearances these days.

The careers of two sisters, Rosemary and Betty Clooney, parallel their days in Wildwood during the 1950s. Rosemary was a newly born superstar when she performed at the new upscale Bolero Club in 1951 and a few years later at Lou Booth’s Chateau Monterey, which in more than one way had numerous fans when Sally Rand starred there before it was destroyed by fire in 1938. Booth, considered a pioneer in local nightclubbing, showed her resiliency with a new club that starred, among other headliners, an increasingly  popular Rosemary  Clooney in the mid-1950s after she appeared with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in the film, “White Christmas.” Kaye and Crosby were already superstars at the time.

Though not attaining the superstar status of her sister, Betty Clooney nevertheless achieved a good share of fame in her own right. She was a headliner at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the early 1950s and was featured regularly on the Gary Moore Show on television. In 1957, the time when women singers were very popular, she followed her sister to the Bolero Club and was among other singing stars featured there such as Patti Page, Georgia Gibbs and Teresa Brewer. Soon after, she retired from show business to raise a family of four children and to die at the early age of 45 of a cerebral hemorrhage in July of 1976.

As Wildwood was finding itself in the entertainment world during the Roaring Twenties, Rosemary Clooney was born on May 23, 1928. Her sister came into this world three years later in April of 1931 as the Great Depression caused economic chaos in the nation.

Their young lives were not easy ones, their parents virtually abandoning them by the time they reached 18.

But their singing talents soon came to the forefront when the two girls won a singing audition at a Cincinnati radio station and were hired in 1945 as the Clooney Sisters for a late night radio program at $20 a week.

In the days of the Big Bands of the 1930s and the war-time‘40s, one of its leaders, Tony Pastor, heard them while traveling through Ohio and he hired them to sing with his band while on tour. Pastor started his career in the Artie Shaw Big Band, which was to appear  in Wildwood in 1941 after Pastor left it and started his own band. In that capacity, Pastor claimed to have traveled more than a million miles.

But not the Clooney Sisters. Two years or so on the road were enough, so Betty returned to Cincinnati and Rosemary followed the route of many aspiring singers and actresses. She went to New York City.

There she was signed to a contract with Columbia Records and met Mitch Miller, who was affiliated with Columbia as its artists and repertoire representative as well as being a top entertainer in his own right. Miller came up with a unique song for her, a novelty tune called “Come O-a My House” which initially turned off Clooney. She thought it was silly and demeaning and had double entendres .Besides she wasn’t sure she could do an Italian accent, she said.

But Miller persisted and Rosemary eventually yielded. The rest is big musical history. The recording became a gold record and made “Rosie,” as she was come to be known, a superstar of her time. It was more than a coincidence then that as her hit record swept the charts, she won star billing at the new Bolero Club in 1951 about the same time the record debuted.

Despite her successes, life was not easy for Clooney. She overcame drug addiction, divorced actor Jose Ferrer and in 1968 suffered a traumatic experience in Los Angeles. She was only a short distance from Bobby Kennedy, her close friend, when he was shot as he was campaigning for the presidency at the Ambassador Hotel.

Clooney retired for a while, undergoing therapy; and then came back big-time with the help of Bing Crosby Her last performance was on Dec. 15 of 2001 at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank. She died the following June 29 after surgery for lung cancer. She was 74 years old.

After the sisters separated early on, Betty Clooney made it on her own, but not as spectacularly as Rosemary. She earned good bookings and in the mid-‘50s she recorded for Coral Records, a subsidiary of Decca.  In 1957, the same year that Betty starred at the Bolero, she joined her sister on the Lux Variety Show. They made a few records together, the best known “Sisters” on the Columbia label.

Soon after, though, Betty retired from show business and died in July of 1976. Her sister and their brother, Nick, started the Betty Clooney Foundation in 1983 and five years later the Betty Clooney Center in Long Beach, Calif. Both are dedicated to the treatment for traumatic brain injuries.

Their visits to Wildwood, occasionally sketchily mentioned in music’s broad history, still bring back memories to the few still alive who were there and followed their careers. It was a grand time for show business here and the Clooneys were part of what made it happen.

(Some of the information for this article was researched at the George F. Boyer Museum of the Wildwood Historical Society and in the book, “Wildwood by the Sea,” written by  David W. and Diane DeMali Francis and Robert J. Scully Sr.)