My little town, Tabor City, is known far and wide as "Razor City", because the citizens loved to have drunken fights with straight razors--this was in the 1940s and 50s!
Town was dry, but sits on the SC/NC border, the "State Line".
No booze in town, but less than a 1/2 mile from downtown was the "Line" and bootleg joints galore.
Combine alcohol, rednecks, women, pool, jukeboxes, & straight razors, and you have all the ingredients for a wild weekend night!
In The Field of Honor (1883), by Ben Truman, the use of the razor is described by a black policeman:
How is an attack made with a razor? Rough-and-tumble, any way to get there. If the man who is attacked doesn't turn and run, he gets slashed in the face and arms, or both. If he tries to run away he is likely to get a rake in the back which will lay open the flesh so wide that the surgeon can look through the man's ribs into his interior like a small boy peeping through the pickets of an orchard fence. A razor is a terrible weapon. I would rather face a revolver than one of them any day.
My dad had a gas station at the town's only stop light. Next door, above a small diner, was a doctor's office, where the doc also lived. Dad said that when he would be closing the station around 10pm, for some fellow to pull up next door, so the doc could patch them up and they could go back to drinking. A few times, fellows would get out of their vehicle holding the loops of their intestines in their hand. They had their belly slashed open down at the Line. The doc would clean everything up, shove things back in their proper place, and sew them up!
It was a common sight when I was a boy to see men in town with huge scars down their faces or across their necks from drunken razor fights.
My senior year in high school I had the honor of serving as a page in the NC State Legislature. For the week I was in Raleigh, NC, I stayed with a host couple. I arrived at their house on the Sunday of that week to get settled in. After introductions were made, they asked where I was from and I told them Tabor City. The husband let out a laugh and told his wife that I was from Razor City, the toughest little town in the state!
In 2011, the first year I hosted, I had a young man come down from Massachusetts. He practiced a unique form of full contact martial arts. Prior to his stay, he contacted a friend who had relocated to Florida from New England. He was trying to find if there was anyone in this area to be a sparring partner for the six weeks he was here. When he told his friend that he was coming to Tabor City, the guy let out a whistle and told him to watch himself. When the young man asked why, his friend told him that "they'll cut you there." In disbelief he asked why. And the friend said "because you're going to Razor City!"
Over the years, Tabor's reputation had spread over vast distances.
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