WYCHMERE HARBOR (Hey!!, Where ya goin"?)

This past Saturday on a warm Fall afternoon I took a photo of Wychmere Harbor from the Rt. 28 overlook in Harwichport. When I first arrived on Cape Cod during the Summer of 1976 Wychmere Harbor was the home of the famous "Thompson's Clam bar Restaurant" located on this harbor side setting to the right in this picture. Click on the above title as a link to hear the famous "Clam bar jingle" prevalent on the radio at that time. This dockside restaurant would serve as many as two thousand dinners a day if my memory serves me correctly. Families enjoyed this location and so did the seagulls as they would come right up to the restaurant deck and beg for food. A couple of my roommates that Summer worked at Thompson's and told me that they had a computerized schedule that would assign waiters and waitresses to different sections for their different shifts so as to make it fair for everyone who worked there to have an equal opportunity to have the same amount of tables in the "prime clam bar locations". Computers weren't that common in 1976 so this restaurant was at the cutting edge of computer technology for the time.

Thompson's Clam Bar was open until 1990 when the restaurant, "Snow Inn" and "Wychmere Harbor Club" were sold and today operate as a private club. Working at the Soundings motel in Dennisport even almost twenty years after this restaurant closed I would occasionally have motel guests ask for directions to Thompson's Clam Bar. I later met "Charlie" who was the general manager of the "Clam bar" during its "heyday".

"Hey!!, Where ya goin'?...I'm going to Thompson's Clam Bar cuz' that's where the tastiest clams are."