The Story of Blue Goose

How It Really Started

Crosstown didn’t start with city planners or progress.
It started with survival.

The year was around 1910, and Shreveport’s west side was a patchwork of wood shacks, tin roofs, and men running from something — war, hunger, or the law. Italians fresh off the Gulf boats from Sicily took root there, too poor to move north, too foreign to be accepted downtown. They learned quick: keep your mouth shut, your debts low, and your back to the wall.

One of them was Sam Fulco.
A small man with the posture of a boxer and the eyes of a priest, Sam came to Shreveport with nothing but a knife, a cross, and the kind of stubborn that can only be bred in poverty. He opened a grocery off Christian Street, just close enough to smell the train yard, just far enough that the police didn’t walk by unless they had a reason.

Sam sold whatever kept people alive — bread, tobacco, canned meat, and on the bad days, whiskey that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Prohibition made it illegal.
Crosstown made it necessary.

The city’s elite sipped gin in mansions; the poor sweated it out on porches. And in that world, a man like Sam became both savior and suspect.

Liquor and Loyalty

By 1922, The Shreveport Times printed headlines that read like wanted posters — “Local Italians Charged in Liquor Raids.” Sam’s name ran beside men like Defatta, Fontana, and Papa — all accused of “operating without a permit” or “selling spirits under guise of produce.”

Truth was, every grocery from Milam to Pickett had a back door, and behind it, something worth drinking.

The cops came in pairs, collecting fines by day and bottles by night. If you paid fast enough, you kept your store. If you didn’t, your name made the paper and your wife cried through church the next Sunday.

Sam didn’t apologize. “You feed a man in this town,” he’d say, “you own his loyalty. You sell him a drink, you own his story.”

And Crosstown had stories.

The Divide

To outsiders, the neighborhood was a maze of poverty. To those who lived there, it was an ecosystem. Black laborers, Italian grocers, and Irish drunks all lived within shouting distance — separated by color in public, bound by survival in private.

Sam walked a dangerous line.
The Italians weren’t fully accepted as white, not by the city or the police. They lived between the two worlds — too dark for downtown, too foreign for segregation’s comfort. So they built their own code.

If a man worked, he ate.
If he lied, he paid.
If he snitched, he disappeared.

The cops raided, the courts fined, and the city pretended the problem was solved. But everyone knew the liquor was still flowing — because it had to.

The Blues Arrive

The nights in Crosstown carried a sound. Not church music. Not the brass of downtown.
It was the blues.

Men like Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, Oscar “Buddy” Woods, and later Guitar Slim played in the bars and backrooms, trading chords for food, bottles, or protection.

You could walk past Snow Street and hear the guitar strings bend under sweat and smoke. The music wasn’t entertainment — it was testimony. Every note was a confession, and Sam’s grocery was the unofficial sanctuary.

The bluesmen came for whiskey, food, and a safe place to sleep. Sam gave them that. In return, they made Crosstown sing.

The Raids

Then came the sweep — the one the papers still whisper about.
Fifty men arrested in one week across Shreveport. Liquor, gambling, prostitution — all bundled under the same word: bootlegging.

The Times ran the story on January 17, 1930, naming grocers, bartenders, and small shop owners. Sam was there — third column, small print, “Fulco, Samuel — charged with illegal possession.” The fine was $250, same as a month’s income.

In court, Sam said nothing.
When the judge asked if he was guilty, he answered in his thick accent, “If I sell water, they say it’s wine. If I sell wine, they say it’s blood. Maybe the problem is they thirsty.”

The courtroom laughed.
The judge did not.

Sam paid and went home. But things changed. Crosstown was getting meaner. The Defatta family started running trucks. Fontana got out of the business. Papa’s store burned under “unknown circumstances.”

Still, Sam kept the doors open — even when the sheriff came for his cut.

 

The Death of a Neighborhood

By the 1960s, the city called it “progress.”
They built the interstate straight through Crosstown, bulldozing what was left of the neighborhood. They tore up Snow Street, buried Pickett, and paved over the sound of the blues.

The Fulco's held on longer than most.
The Blue Goose kept its lights on until the city’s pulse shifted elsewhere — strip malls, suburbs, and a Shreveport that didn’t remember its own ghosts.

When the last day came, Paul locked up slow. The old floorboards groaned. The painted goose on the wall was faded, but still visible.

He turned the key, pocketed it, and walked home through streets that no longer existed.

Historian’s Afterword

This account of Crosstown and the Blue Goose draws from contemporaneous reports in The Shreveport Times (1922, 1930, 1933) and The Shreveport Journal (1925–1948), along with local oral histories of the Fulco, Defatta, and Fontana families.

The names, dates, and locations — including 1103 Snow Street — are factual.
Dialogue and descriptions are reconstructed from court testimony, newspaper excerpts, and regional context.

Crosstown was real.
The Fulco's were real.
And the Blue Goose wasn’t a myth — it was one of the last standing testaments to the hard, unglamorous, working-class world that built Shreveport from the ground up.