Hunt's Starlight Ballroom
is an excerpt from the forthcoming book by Anita Hirsch

MEMORIES OF DOT MARSERO WADLINGER. . . What Dot Marsero Wadlinger remembers most about Wildwood summers was her first paying job and dancing at the Starlight Ballroom.

Dot and her sister, Janet Marsero Berman, spent their summers in the 50’s, with their grandparents, Vincent and Olympia Marsero, who owned a rooming house, the JanDot Hotel on Oak Avenue.

Coming from the city life of Philadelphia, and always under the watchful eye of her parents, Dot welcomed the freedom she had in Wildwood. Dot’s first paying job was the summer that she was 16. She earned a dollar an hour at Woolworth’s Five & Dime on Pacific Avenue. As soon as she received her weekly pay of $36 dollars, she went across the street to the Marine National Bank and deposited $30 in her savings account and kept $6 for spending that week. By the end of the summer, Dot was able to save enough to buy a car: a ‘52 Kaiser for $300. Oak Avenue was the location of many of the clubs, but you had to be twenty-one years old to get into those. At the end of Oak at the Boardwalk was the Starlight Ballroom where Dot could go to dance. Only sodas were served at the Starlight Ballroom and it only cost $1.00 to get in. Dot remembers, “the ocean flowed right underneath the Boardwalk and the Starlight Ballroom.”

Every Wednesday and Saturday nights, Dot would walk up to the Starlight Ballroom. She remembers that , “One of the nights was called party night”. Joe Grady and Ed Hurst were the disc jockeys who “ran the dances.” At the end of each night, “like a New Years Eve party,” they would play “Golden Slipper” the famous South Philly Mummers’ song and then “Auld Lange Syne.” Dot still looks forward to coming to Wildwood several times each summer to dance at the clubs but now the songs she likes are called “the oldies”. She especially enjoys the Fifties and Sixties weekends in Wildwood where on Friday night Hops Dot can dance to the oldies tunes spun by Jerry Blavat.

There is a Starlight Ballroom in the new Wildwood Convention Center because of a suggestion from Bob Bright Jr. and his father, Bob Bright Sr. that the ballroom in the convention center be called the Starlight Ballroom to honor a part of Wildwood’s past. There is a neon sign in the lobby, funded by the Crest Savings Bank, pointing to the location of the newest Starlight Ballroom.

STARLIGHT BALLROOM HISTORY: The Hunt family, who owned property and buildings in Wildwood, opened a Starlight Ballroom in Hunt’s Pier in 1936. It was moved to the Ocean Pier but still kept the name Starlight Ballroom. On warm summer nights, everyone dressed up to go, it was the place to learn to jitterbug, to meet your friends, or to meet that special girl or guy. A boy would walk across the dance floor to ask a girl to dance under the spinning and sparkling globe.

The “Big Bands” appeared there: Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, and Woody Herman . The only bands that didn’t play there were Benny Goodman and Harry James. A fire in the Ocean Pier Starlight Ballroom in 1943 caused the Hunt family to find another available place and they opened a Hunt’s Starlight Ballroom at their pier site on Oak Avenue. Ginny Wood, a lifelong resident of Wildwood, recollects that her father, John Wood, was in business then to refinish floors. Ginny said that he resurfaced the floor of the newest Starlight Ballroom before it opened. Her parents would take her to the Starlight Ballroom to introduce her to the music and she remembers hearing Ray Charles, the Shirelles, Paul Anka and the Fifth Dimension there.

When she was a teen, she went with her friends to the Starlight almost every night in the summers. “That was the only place to go!” The Starlight Ballroom was packed with kids. They danced all night and every night to live entertainment. In the early 60’s “when the Bristol Stomp was popular, the floor of the Starlight Ballroom would move in waves as the dancers jumped”, says Ginny, “you could feel it”! Bill Haley and the Comets returned to the Starlight in 1955, Labor Day Weekend. This group had been one of the biggest night club attractions in Wildwood. They were the headliners for the off season in Wildwood and made famous the song: “That’ll Be The Day.”

After the Big Band era, the main ballroom that held 2600, was often packed with a standing room only crowd to hear records played by a DJ. That was where Dick Clark got his start; he was there for several years before he moved to Philadelphia TV.

In 1957, Grady and Hurst were the two men who played the recordings for the dancers. Later Ron Diamond played for those who came to dance. As the music changed into hard rock or heavy metal, the kids didn’t dance, and the drinking age was lowered to 18 so the older teens could go into the clubs to hear live music and dance and drink.

The Starlight Ballroom, still owned by the Hunt’s family, changed too, and was made into an arcade with twelve businesses and in 1981, because of a short in a wire in one of the concessions, a fire started and because of the high winds, Hunt’s Starlight Ballroom burned to the ground. Weeks afterward the burned smell lingered in the air. (Source: an article by Barbara St. Clair in the Wildwood Leader in 2004.)