Hey Where Aren't You Going?

Thompson's, owned by the three Thompson brothers — Frank, Biddle and Edric — was founded in 1950. At one time it was the largest seasonal restaurant east of the Mississippi; the staff could serve 2,000 dinners a night from mid-June to mid-September. Cars would back up along Snow Inn Road to Route 28.


College students and locals, including a young Foster, remember the dishes they washed, the potatoes they wrapped in foil for baking, the cars they parked and the lobsters they served. And almost against their will, they remember that radio jingle, one of two created to advertise the restaurant until it closed in 1995.
"I'm going to Thompson's Clam Bar, because that's where the tastiest clams are," Foster warbled during a recent interview at his family's Harwich Port home. "The jingle was inescapable ..."
The Clam Bar changed the lives of Cape Codders forever, he said.

Patrons would wait an hour to an hour and a half for a table in the 450-seat restaurant with more than 250 workers, said Harwich resident Charles Meader, general manager at the Clam Bar in the 1980s. He met his future wife there, just one of 20 marriages he can easily remember among Thompson's employees.
Like many of them, he also worked at other Thompson businesses, including the adjacent Snow Inn, which opened in 1891, and the Wychmere Harbor Club. In the 1940s and '50s the inn's produce was grown on the Thompson family farm, now the town-owned Thompson's Field. Baird Eaton of Dennis, stepson of Biddle Thompson, tallied thousands of lives touched by the business, including all the young people working their way through college. In the 1960s, he worked at a second Thompson's Clam Bar in North Truro.

Generations worked for the Harwich Port restaurant. Foster's father was the first clam-shucker at Thompson's in 1950. Foster worked there from 1977 to 1979, first as a dishwasher, then making salads and desserts, earning enough there and later at the Wychmere Harbor Club to pay his way through Dartmouth College and graduate school. "Being a dishwasher at the Clam Bar is the closest to Dickensian hell that I can imagine," Foster said. "You leave drenched in sweat, and the smell of strong lobster butter would never really leave your skin the whole summer."

But, oh, the staff parties made up for it, he said. Then, the Thompson brothers died and their widows could no longer run the family business, Eaton said.The family sold their businesses in 1983 to J. Richard Fennell who ran the Clam Bar through 1995. He briefly opened another Thompson's Clam Bar on Route 28 in Harwich Port, but that's not the place people remember. They still drive down Snow Inn Road, looking for the original. But Thompson's lives in hearts everywhere. In the boondocks of Venezuela, Meader and his wife heard two tourists break into the Clam Bar jingle when a bus driver asked them, "Where ya going?"

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