How Ted Turner and the Lowcountry shaped each other

Ted Turner’s impact on the world has turned everyone into “the Mouth of the South” trying to recite it all following his death at 87 last Wednesday.

Not many tell you that Turner’s swashbuckling life has the imprint of the Lowcountry on it as clear as his Rhett Butler mustache. Or that Turner, in turn, left South Carolina with one of its greatest assets.

As a boy in Savannah, the influence of John M. McIntosh put saltwater in Turner’s veins that even a herd of buffalo could never remove.

McIntosh — and his father, Olin T. McIntosh, and brother Olin T. Jr. — were equally influential on the rising tide of Hilton Head Island as development began in the 1950s.

Their influence is seen in the low-key Spanish Wells neighborhood they developed after laying enough groundwork to get prospective customers to the island to begin with.

Those McIntoshes were water people. Olin T. Sr. and his wife, Jane Lawton McIntosh, never missed their daily swim in the ocean at Folly Field, year-round, even when they were both in their 70s, her obituary said.

Olin T. Jr.’s son, Nash, celebrated his 70th birthday by swimming from Tybee to Hilton Head.

And they were boat people. John McIntosh won more than 500 sailing trophies, taught generations of young people to sail and was instrumental in getting the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta and its sailing competition to Savannah.

The most famous of those young people he taught was Ted Turner, who splashed onto the world stage as “Captain Outrageous” when he won the America’s Cup in 1977.

Among the crewmen aboard Turner’s yacht Courageous was his childhood friend, architect Bunky Helfrich, who was a co-owner of Palmetto Bay Marina on Hilton Head.

That brought the Courageous to the island, as well as Turner’s subsequent racing yacht, Tenacious.

Palmetto Bay Marina partner John Rumsey also crewed with Turner, who won more than 500 sailing trophies other than the big one in 1977. And Rumsey, in a history of the marina on its website, gives us this memorable quote from Turner: “I hate the sea. But I hate land worse.”

Save the land

But Turner loved the land of the Lowcountry very much.

His father owned two Lowcountry plantations, including Bindon Plantation in Yemassee, where Robert Edward Turner Jr. killed himself in 1963 as his billboard company was sinking in debt.

Ted Turner had to sell those properties, but he got his own in 1978 with the purchase of the 4,200-acre Hope Plantation in Colleton County.

He later purchased the 5,800-acre Kinloch Plantation near Georgetown.

And in 1979, he added a place that became dear to his family of five children — the 4,680-acre St. Philips Island off of St. Helena Island in Beaufort County.

It was in these quiet holdings of magnificent trees, sandy roads and curious wildlife that Turner repaid the gift that the Lowcountry had given him in his life’s foundation.

He wanted the land to be preserved in all its graceful grandeur, not developed into Bucceeville, which is the order of the shortsighted today.

Turner is credited with jump-starting South Carolina’s land conservation ethic that resulted in the ACE Basin, where private landowners followed Turner’s lead and have collectively conserved from development more than 350,000 acres between Beaufort and Charleston now known as one of the “last great places” on Earth.

Ted Turner was the first private property owner in the ACE Basin to put a conservation easement on his land.

He worked through LaBruce “Brusi” Alexander and the South Carolina chapter of The Nature Conservancy in 1988 to restrict development forever on Hope Plantation on the Edisto River.

Turner’s high profile and long record of conservation helped put the idea of easements in the minds of other property owners. He encouraged others to join him. And they thought if he would do it, it must be smart.

“Now we had gone from theory to having something concrete,” Alexander told me when the Lowcountry celebrated the 25th anniversary of the ACE Basin movement.

Turner later conserved St. Philips Island, and in 2017 sold it to the state to be managed as a park open to the public.

This approach to land — something that pushed Turner to buy some 2 million acres worldwide — would be the most important way the Lowcountry shaped Turner.

And he shaped us.

Rise above failure

In one of the many interviews being re-aired over the past week, Turner was asked by Barbara Walters what lasting advice he’d been given by his father.

Turner flashed his trademark grin and replied:

“Early to bed

Early to rise.

Work like hell

And advertise!”

It made her laugh.

But he volunteered something different when he spoke to the Boys Club in Beaufort in the spring of 1988.

Guy McSweeney, then president of the club that’s now part of Boys & Girls Clubs of the Lowcountry, had a major hit on his hands as children lined up for autographs. About 300 kids came to see “Terrible Ted” and enjoy steaks and hamburgers at the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot.

Beaufort Gazette reporter Mary Jo Miller wrote that Turner told them to “think globally and act locally.”

He urged the children to see themselves as citizens of the world, and to treat all races and nationalities with dignity and respect.

And he passed on to them what he called his father’s favorite piece of advice. “What the mind of man can see and conceive, the mind of man can achieve,” Turner said.

“When I was young, I wasn’t fast, I wasn’t strong and I wasn’t big enough to be good at any sports until I learned to sail,” he said.

“It took me 15 years to get really good, and then I was the best.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.