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.

Times were changing, it was agreed, and so was the population in sizes and composition and whenever large numbers of people come together, it was thought, inevitably some problems arise that require law and order in more than an impromptu manner.

Still, it wasn’t until June of 1906 that the position of chief of police was created in Wildwood.

That honor at a salary of $60 a month went to W. D. Middleton, who still did not have a badge of authority for more than three months until the mayor recommended the purchase of four police uniforms, six coat badges, six batons with cords and a set of handcuffs. The mayor also reminded the police chief that he was receiving complaints about speeding automobiles and the maximum limit by state law was 12 miles per hour, and he expected that to be enforced.

Improvement in law enforcement was to come, however, as the years moved on. There were times that it was all in the family.

Like in the case of the Cobb family, whose father and son combination both served as police chiefs of Wildwood. Perhaps  typical of the period when the fire companies were the major catalysts for what was happening in their towns, even when there were no fires, Oakford M. Cobb, the father, came directly to the post of police chief  with a background that was all fire fighting.

Oakford was the first full-time paid fireman in the Holly Beach Fire Company, having been appointed to that position in 1913. He was soon sent to Elmira, N.Y. to study the operation of mechanized fire fighting equipment after a 65-foot ladder truck was purchased by the Holly Beach company, which has retained its name to this day although there no longer is a Holly Beach.

Eight years later in 1921, the start of a riotous decade that was to be called “The Roaring ’20s,” Cobb was appointed police chief of Wildwood, a position he held for 30 years, many of them turbulent and involving bootleggers during the Prohibition Era, and the fear of German submarines off shore during World War II. One of the legendary stories from the rum runner days was that Oakford was shot during a gun battle.

Oakford retired on New Year’s Day of 1951 and lived for 10 ten more years. He died in October of 1961. His son, William Henry Cobb about whom little has been written in history, succeeded his father as police chief.

Soon, in 1925,  a few cops from  Wildwood and North Wildwood were to learn that law enforcement was changing from those early days of tracking down people who were shooting cows and pigs that were wandering onto their properties.

Officers Walter Mason and Albert Smulling, both of the North Wildwood force, were among those assigned to a posse to track down three bank robbers who had shot and killed a bank official during the stick-up. Two from Wildwood, identified in historical accounts only as Sergeant Forcum and Patrolman Long, also participated in the manhunt.

The hold-up occurred on a Saturday morning at the Tuckahoe National Bank in the upper regions of the county and the armed robbery and the capture of the bandits were described then as “unequalled in the records of Cape May County.”

On that morning, soon after the bank had opened, a young man entered the building with two others, armed with revolvers and blackjacks, and one of them asked cashier Edward L. R. Rice to change a five dollar bill and then forced him into a vault where he collected the money, some $8,000. He then struck Rice on the head and his victim fell to the floor unconscious.

Meanwhile, in another room, Phoebe Rice, Edward’s wife, was attending to bank affairs with E.L. Tomlin, a bank director, when they heard the noise and rushed to assist the fallen man.

The invaders intercepted them and the Rice woman was knocked to the floor from the force of a hand held pipe, and Tomlin was shot in the head, to be declared dead three days later at the Atlantic City Hospital.

Rebecca Gandy, a merchant nearby, had just arrived at the bank’s doorway to make a deposit when she met one of the robbers. He told her to get inside quickly, she later told police, but instead she turned around  and “started to scream.” Soon the men exited, one carrying a bag on his shoulder, and they ran across the street to the parked getaway car.

The bandits drove away but not unscathed. Outside the bank William Hess had a double barrel gun loaded with buckshot with him. He fired at the getaway car and the gun load pierced the auto’s rear curtains, broke the windshield and hit one of the trio in the back of the head. Hess tried a second load, but the cartridge failed to fire.

Soon, as the word quickly got out, more cars carrying drivers and passengers with shotguns, arrived on the scene and the hunt for the killers began. Meanwhile, Sheriff George Aloysius Redding, who was soon to become mayor of North Wildwood, assembled a posse that was to include some from North Wildwood and Wildwood.

Their trail took them to the woods near Tuckahoe where the buckshot-sprayed car had been abandoned. Mason and Smulling, guided by a boy and a man, were led through the dense woods for about a mile when they found the bandits and arrested them without incident. Two were handcuffed and the third, as it was described in a newspaper article, “was led out by the collar.”

As they emerged from the woods the North Wildwood cops met Wildwood’s officers Forcum and Long who also had been on the search mission in the foliage and swamps of the territory.

“It was simply luck,” Smulling was to say after he and Mason had been accorded much publicity from the apprehension. “Any or either of the other fellows might have made the capture. It was some work going in, and not much easier coming out. The fellows had disposed of their guns. They each had on two pairs of trousers and we found the big portion of the money in the legs of the pants.”

The bandits were identified as James G. Pettitt, Walter Laird and Gustav Andreson. They were tried soon after and an all male jury found them guilty of first degree murder with a recommendation of life imprisonment. Some of the jurors were to say that they opposed capital punishment and rejected the prosecutor’s appeal for a death penalty.

(Some of the information in this article was researched at the reference department of the Cape May County Library in Court House.)