From D.C. to the Deep Seas

The moment you step onto Salt Cay in the Turks and Caicos, the modern world falls away. Sunlight shimmers across turquoise waters, soft white sand shifts beneath your feet and beach grass brushes your ankles like a whispered greeting. In the distance, a donkey’s hooves clop lazily over sun-baked paths.

Locals call it “the island that time forgot,” and it couldn’t be further from the cramped newsroom in Foggy Bottom where Ken Chaletzky, B.B.A. ’71, and Dirck Holscher, J.D. ’79, first crossed paths amid the clatter of typewriters and the hum of fluorescent lights.

Ink and Ambition

Ken Chaletzky had three requirements when it came to choosing a college: It had to be in a city; it had to be close to his hometown of Boston; and the legal drinking age had to be 18. The George Washington University, located in the heart of D.C., checked all of those boxes in 1967.

But GW also provided something Chaletzky never could have anticipated—a front-row seat to history. His college years were a maelstrom of Vietnam War protests, the March on the Pentagon, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “It had to be the most exciting time to be in Washington ever,” he recalls.

Amid the tumult, Chaletzky found his community at The Hatchet, GW’s student newspaper. He climbed from advertising salesman to business and production manager, often lingering late into the night as pages came together. “I spent more time there than in class,” he admits with a laugh. “The Hatchet became my second family.”

That family soon expanded to include Dirck Holscher. A graduate of American University, Holscher was working at a local print shop when he saw Chaletzky’s ad for an assistant production manager. He applied, and his technical expertise immediately stood out. “I was thrilled to have someone who actually knew production,” Chaletzky says.

The work was demanding but electric: midnight paste-ups, tight deadlines and even protests marching just outside the student union. “There was always something happening,” Holscher says.

When Chaletzky graduated in 1971, Holscher took over as The Hatchet’s first full-time, salaried production manager. At the same time, he enrolled at GW Law, taking advantage of the university’s employee tuition benefit. By day, he wrangled type and layouts; by night, he parsed case law—a juggling act Holscher still remembers vividly.

“It was a grind, no question,” he recalls. “I’d go to the law school four or five nights a week, then walk a couple of blocks back to the newsroom. I basically lived in that little bubble: law school, The Hatchet and my apartment a block away. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Chaletzky, meanwhile, gave his family’s Florida real estate business a try…briefly. “Frankly, I’m unemployable,” he jokes. “I just can’t work for anyone else. I’ve always been an entrepreneur.”

Determined to strike out on his own, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to pursue his M.B.A. But he suspected his real education would come outside the classroom, so every Thursday during his final semester, Chaletzky packed his car for the three-hour drive down I-95 to D.C. There, he and Holscher worked late into the night, dog-eared notebooks and half-empty coffee cups scattered around them as their inaugural business venture slowly took shape.

In 1974, the pair launched Circle Graphics, a computerized typesetting company. Their first major client? George Washington University. “Having GW as a reference gave us credibility,” Chaletzky says. “For a long time, they were our biggest account.”

Circle Graphics proved Chaletzky and Holscher could start a business. What came next proved they could dominate one.

East of Expectations

The duo’s subsequent venture was born less from inspiration than irritation. When a broken copier left them scrambling, Holscher suggested they take matters into their own hands. In 1979, Copy General opened its first location in Georgetown, a modest storefront that quickly grew into a recognizable D.C. brand. By the mid-1980s, the company had six shops across the city, making it the largest independent copy chain in Washington.

Many entrepreneurs might have stopped there. But the world was changing fast, and with it, their ambitions. As the Iron Curtain collapsed, an unexpected new market emerged: Eastern Europe.

Their entry point into Europe came thanks to another Hatchet connection. Paul Panitz, B.A. ’70, former editor of the paper, had relocated to Budapest just as the country was opening up to the West. Seeing opportunity amid the changes, he urged Chaletzky and Holscher to join him there. For the pair, it was both a reunion with an old newsroom colleague and a chance to test their entrepreneurial instincts on an entirely different stage—one where even a copy shop could feel revolutionary.

Initially, customers weren’t quite sure what to make of it (“People would come in, look around and leave without copying a thing,” Holscher recalls), but confusion soon gave way to demand. Students, small businesses and even government officials lined up once word spread about the convenience Copy General offered. The company quickly became one of the first truly consumer-facing service businesses in Budapest’s post-communist economy, a small but telling sign of how daily life was evolving.

From that first foothold, they grew quickly, opening more shops in Hungary and expanding into Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, Latvia and Croatia, with test ventures as far afield as Shanghai. Each move came with both promise and peril: Infrastructure was shaky, regulations murky and reliable local partners hard to find. Still, the chance to build businesses in countries racing headlong into capitalism was impossible to resist.

“The opportunities were immense, but so were the risks,” Chaletzky says, noting how one manager in Budapest required round-the-clock armed security just to keep the doors open. “I mean, there’s no class in business school on how to deal with the Russian mafia.”

But after decades of chasing growth in capitals from Washington to Warsaw, the pair realized that they weren’t young men anymore, and they found themselves longing for a quieter life.

Paradise, Incorporated

Holscher was the first to find Salt Cay. On a trip to the Turks and Caicos in the mid-2010s, he and his wife, Karen, took a day excursion to the remote island and were immediately captivated. With no hotels, no stoplights and more donkeys than people, Salt Cay felt untouched by time.

“I fell in love with it right away,” Holscher says. “There were old buildings still standing from the 1700s, incredible natural beauty and just 80 or so people living there. I love history and small communities, and it felt like a throwback in the best way.”

He was so taken with the island that he and Karen eventually built a small house on the beach. “It reminded me of the rural community I grew up in 70 years ago,” he says. “Quiet, simple and neighborly in a way that felt rare.”

When Chaletzky visited in 2016, he understood right away. The island’s stillness was the antithesis of the bustling metropolises where they had spent most of their careers. “You could walk half a mile in either direction and not see another soul,” he says. “It was just gorgeous.”

That tranquility, however, wouldn’t last. In 2017, back-to-back hurricanes tore through Salt Cay, leaving the island battered and its longtime dive shop owner ready to call it quits. But where most saw only destruction, Holscher saw possibility—and he picked up the phone. “I called Ken and said, ‘Do you still want to own a dive shop?’” he recalls with a laugh. “I figured if anyone was crazy enough to do this with me, it was him.”

For Chaletzky, it was a dream come true. “I’ve been diving since the late ’60s, and it’s always been my dream to own a dive shop,” he says. “So when Dirck called, the answer was yes.”

Together with a local partner, they bought Salt Cay Divers in late 2018. True to form, they went to work: upgrading equipment, buying a new boat—Lovely Linda, named after Chaletzky’s wife—and investing in the restaurant and bar attached to the shop. Soon, they added guesthouses and eventually became the island’s largest employers.

But for Chaletzky and Holscher, the real magic of Salt Cay lies just offshore. There, the seafloor drops into a vertical wall that runs for miles, draped in sponges and sea fans, and alive with schools of colorful fish. Shipwrecks dot the ocean bed, their cannons and beams now part of the reef. Even after a lifetime of diving across the globe, Chaletzky says nothing else compares.

And sometimes, the sea offers something even rarer. Each winter, humpback whales migrate through the Columbus Passage to mate and calve. Their low, resonant songs carry for miles, felt as much as heard. Divers and snorkelers don’t seek them out—it’s illegal to deliberately pursue them—but chance encounters happen: a tail breaking the surface nearby, or the sudden shadow of a giant passing just beneath.

“Sometimes they surprise you,” Holscher says. “We’ve had a mother bring her calf so close you could almost reach out and touch them. We never chase them; we let them come to us, and when they do, it’s extraordinary. It feels like being in their world, on their terms.”

In many ways, that’s how Chaletzky and Holscher have approached their own lives: charting a course on their terms, ready for the unexpected when it arrives.

“Not in my wildest dreams did I think we’d still be working together 50 years later, let alone running a dive shop on a tiny island,” Holscher says. “But life takes turns, and Ken and I always trusted each other enough to take the leap.”

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