In 1984, Dr. Jonathan Sack was a 35-year-old physician who had been practicing for 10 years in Johannesburg. But apartheid-era tensions in his South African hometown were boiling over, manifesting themselves in racial and political violence, and Sack decided it was time to prepare an escape.
“It was starting to get ugly,” he says. “It was getting unpleasant living there.”
He and his wife, Amy, hopped on a sailboat and spent a few months cruising the world. And a fortunate jaunt up the east coast of America put them on a course straight to Hilton Head. “We stopped here for gas and never left,” he says. “I didn’t really know the place existed before.”