Seth Hamblin, who went from hiking and wandering the hills of the San Geronimo Valley as an adolescent to working as a head graphics editor at the Wall Street Journal, died on June 1 of a heart attack after running a race in Morris Township, N.J. He was 46 years old.
Seth was a widely traveled man who reported in Egypt and Aruba before working for national newspapers in the United States, where he oversaw the design of graphics that accompanied three Pulitzer Prize-winning stories in the Washington Post. His mother and brother, who both live in Inverness, say he dove deeply into the subjects and hobbies that gripped him, whether that was deejaying house music at clubs in Washington, D.C., or gardening at his home in South Orange, N.J.
“The thing about Seth is, he’s this kind of fanatical guy. He just grabs things and goes with them,” said Colin Hamblin, his only sibling and one of the doctors at the West Marin Health Clinic.
Seth and his family lived in Ross in his early childhood; his mother, Kay Hamblin, taught at what is now The Branson School, where his father, Basil Hamblin, was a dean. Seth was cultured at a young age, accompanying his parents and Branson students on annual six-week trips to Europe. His mom and dad also took him to numerous museums as a child. Although as a kid he was more involved in music and theater than art, his interests at museums perhaps hinted as his visually focused career. “When we went to a museum, he chose things more in graphic art as opposed to classic Renaissance paintings,” Kay said.
She and Basil often took the kids to Limantour Beach, where Seth and Colin would build forts and play in the water so long their skin would practically turn blue. The family held a number of Thanksgiving dinners on an overlook at Limantour, too, bringing the entire feast—fancy plates, turkey and all.
The family moved to Woodacre in the late 1970s, when Seth was in fifth grade or so. The valley was a little more freewheeling back then. “It was a crazy place to grow up. There was a lot of drug use,” Colin said. A number of famous people lived or spent time there back then, too. (One friend recalled being in the car with Seth while Kay, who drove an orange Volkswagen Beetle, briefly followed the German actor Klaus Kinski, who starred in numerous Werner Herzog films.)
Seth and his cohort regularly played Dungeons and Dragons, often in a teepee on the Hamblin property up the road from the Woodacre Improvement Club. He was well versed in the background and story of the game. “You wouldn’t see them for three days. I’d take the food down to the tent…and push the food through to keep them alive,” Kay said.
Seth and his friends also spent their days hiking and biking in the hills. “He would suggest we go on these extensive hikes,” said Shandor Hassan, a childhood friend whom he met around seventh grade. “There was a sense of adventure connected to it. I think he liked to create some of these—similar to like, D&D—these mythic adventures we would go on.”
Shandor recalled Seth being a little more dapper than other kids, often wearing a hat and perhaps a little jewelry, but that he was immediately welcomed into the fold of those who had lived there for their entire lives. (The girls liked him, too. “It seemed like he was a little more advanced in that department,” Shandor said.)
Seth also played soccer and did theater, playing a chimney sweep in one production of “Mary Poppins.” Childhood friend Kimberly Pinkson recalled that she, Seth and another friend, on their own initiative, choreographed a dance to one song. His acting chops apparently extended into the world of miming; Kay actually wrote a book about miming, called “Mime: A Playbook of Silent Fantasy,” and a few pictures of young Seth, face painted black and white, appear in its pages.
As a young teenager, he started to play bass, which Shandor said he picked up quickly—not much of a surprise. “He accelerated with everything. He would pick something up and he just seemed to accelerate,” he said.
While Seth was in high school, at Drake, he worked for a time in the garden at Green Gulch Zen Center. His parents’ divorce around that time was tough on him, Colin said, but he graduated early and his parents sent him to Greece for a year. There he enrolled in a language program and worked with a local fisherman and tradesman. After he returned, he took a few classes at College of Marin and Big Bear School of Music, at Fort Mason.
“All of a sudden he decided he needed to get his life together,” Colin said, so he enrolled in the California Institute of Fine Arts, studied bass and music composition and earned a bachelor’s degree in music. But he realized that a career in music was not practical.
At that point, Kay was living in Cairo, teaching at Cairo American College. Seth moved there in 1990 and translated his interest in music into writing a monthly music column as well as feature arts stories for Cairo Today, a magazine. He also reported for the English edition of the newspaper El Haram.
His brother joined them for a few months, writing tourist guides for the pyramids. Colin had also worked in journalism, having earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. “When we lived in Cairo together,” Kay said, “they’d have competitive conversations—like, who’s the prime minister of some obscure country and how do you spell his name? It was very funny.”
After a year in Cairo, Seth went with his mother to Aruba, an island just north of Venezuela, where she had another teaching post and he reported and edited for the daily newspaper Aruba Today.
Upon his return to the United States, Seth earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, one of the most esteemed journalism programs in the country.
In 1995, he landed his first job at a national newspaper, the Washington Post. He started as a contributing writer, rising through the ranks to edit stories before becoming a graphics editor for the national section.
At the Post, Seth still got to write a bit about trips overseas. He wrote one piece for the Post’s travel section about Morgan’s Rock, an eco-resort in Nicaragua. In 2003, he traveled to Iceland en route to London and wrote a story about Rejkjavik’s club scene.
Seth also moonlighted as a deejay in D.C., spinning records under the name Selector Seth. He assembled an impressive collection of about 10,000 records, Colin said; then one day, he decided he was done deejaying, and he sold virtually all of them. He took up swing dance instead.
He met his wife, Tanya Prescott, in D.C. They moved to New Jersey and Seth landed a new job at The Wall Street Journal in 2007, where he started as a graphics editor and rose to become the graphics chief and then the Deputy Global Visual Editor, overseeing over 100 staffers. Teams he guided at the Journal created graphics for a wide range of stories, with topics ranging from emojis and money spent on Valentine’s Day to the legalization of same-sex marriage and health care reform.
“Someone said, ‘How can you work for Rupert Murdoch?’” Kay recalled. “Seth said, ‘Well, it’s nice to work for someone who puts his money into his newspaper.’”
Seth, Tanya and their two cats lived in South Orange, N.J., in a small house with a big yard, where he continued to pick up new hobbies and passions. He had recently started playing Dungeons and Dragons again, attending a few conventions and playing regularly, and had taken up competitive shooting, in which he would run, roll and dodge through a course as he shot targets alongside ex-army guys.
He also immersed himself in gardening, often lugging surplus vegetables and homegrown catnip to his coworkers at the Journal. As with most of his interests, his knowledge went deep. “I’d call him and he’d talk about the pH of the soil and how that affected certain things,” Colin said. His time in the outdoors extended to hiking and running, and he was becoming more involved with a local conservancy group there.
Seth also kept up his love of hats over the years. When Kay, who lived abroad for 21 years, worked in Europe, the two traveled to Milan, where he bought hats to add to his collection. Just before he died, he and Tanya were in London and he bought a eggplant-colored Panama hat at a haberdashery. Of his newest hat, Seth said that a leader should have something distinctive.
He never lost the drive to learn something new. Already versed in wildflowers, which he often photographed on walks and hikes, Seth wanted to improve his tree identification skills. He also wanted to shore fish at Limantour during a planned visit to West Marin this fall. He would have loved to return with Tanya, Kay said, but his job kept him on the other side of the country.
On his most recent trip to West Marin—he visited at least a few times a year—Seth and Kay had driven through Samuel P. Taylor State Park and were climbing Olema Hill on their way to Inverness. Out of the blue, Kay recalled, her well-traveled son said, ‘This is the most beautiful place in the world.’”
“And he meant it,” Kay added.
Seth is survived by his mother, Kay; his father, Basil; his brother, Colin, and Colin’s wife, Trisha; and his niece, Zoe, and nephews Max and Derek and Derek’s wife, Anne, and son, Jonas. Donations in his honor can be made to the South Mountain Conservancy, based in South Orange. A West Marin memorial is being planned.