One more ‘thank you’to the lateSol Blatt Jr.

It is hard to describe the bankruptcy crisis that hit Hilton Head Island 30 years ago.

It is harder still to imagine what may have happened to the island without the intervention of U.S. District Judge Sol Blatt Jr.

The community thanked Blatt as best it could, naming the Cross Island Parkway for him, holding a Sol Blatt Day, and letting him lead the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

With Blatt’s death Wednesday at 94, we find our gratitude renewed.

Blatt was the only child of one of South Carolina’s most powerful and colorful figures, state Rep. Solomon Blatt of Barnwell, who served in the state’s House of Representatives for 53 years, 33 of them as its speaker.

Like many others, Blatt fell in love with Hilton Head and was among the earliest property owners in Palmetto Dunes.

That love, and the judge’s deep connections, ended up changing history when the island’s largest employer went bankrupt in 1986.

Hilton Head Holdings Corp. had been cobbled together from the assets of two longtime island companies — the Sea Pines Co. and the Hilton Head Co. — less than two years before. The company owned property and business operations in Sea Pines, Shipyard, Wexford, Port Royal and Indigo Run. Its collapse directly affected a third of the island, but the entire community reeled from the blow.

The company was in debt to the tune of $100 million, 90 percent of that in real estate mortgages. But more than 2,000 creditors, many of them local businesses, were owed $10 million.

The bankruptcy threatened not only individual livelihoods, but the reputation of Hilton Head as a first-class resort and the future of the island’s premier sporting event, the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing. National media swarmed to Hilton Head to cover the story of a premier resort falling into disrepute.

“Everybody was worried,” Blatt would say later. “The only way we got through that was the Lord got us.”

Working with his close friend and former Gov. John C. West of Hilton Head, Blatt took charge of the case. And even with no bankruptcy experience, Blatt took the rare step of holding on to the case rather than turn it over to a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge. At one of the first hearings, Blatt described himself and West as “the blind leading the blind.”

Blatt named island tourism leader John C. Curry as trustee, and they tried to balance what they thought was right for Hilton Head with the pressures to sell the company’s assets for the most money possible to pay off creditors. Those competing interests made for fiery court hearings, and it eventually resulted in Blatt’s removal from the case by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court said Blatt’s Hilton Head ties had created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

But in one of this community’s darkest hours, Blatt said: “I’m not going to supervise the demise of Hilton Head Island when I can stop it.”

And again we say, “thank you.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 10:57 AM with the headline "One more ‘thank you’to the lateSol Blatt Jr.."