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CHARLES and CHRISTIAN SEABORN

 

In spite of their hectic, terrifying, dangerous and upsetting childhoods, the brothers Seaborn – Charles and Christian – managed to go on to have successful careers, at least for a while. More accurately, because of that childhood was why they had the careers that they did have.

 

1966 was the year when it all began for the boys. Perhaps it was not just the childhood that Charles and Christian were trying to escape from that started it all. Maybe it was also in their genes, in their DNA. After all, most boys do not start their career aspirations when they are twelve and ten year olds.

 

Their famous Uncle, yacht racing designer Ben Seaborn, had designed his first racing sailboat when he had been seventeen-years-old, still a senior in high school, in 1931. The following year, that sixty-two foot yacht, the Circe, would actually be constructed and launched.

 

Closer to home, Charles and Christian’s mother (Nora Hitchman Seaborn) had started planning her career goals of being a lawyer and active in politics at the age of six, graduating from high school at sixteen and entering the University of Oregon Law School that same year. She passed the Oregon State Bar at the age of twenty-one (the minimum age to become a lawyer) in 1937 – an era when women usually did not pursue such lofty goals as the law and politics.

 

Charles’s love affair with the animals of the ocean (or critters, as he would affectionately call them) all began innocently enough in the spring of 1966.

 

Determined that her sons, in spite of their home life, would have the benefits of a solid education, Nora had entered her sons in St. Helens Hall, an Episcopal Church school in Portland in preschool. The school held an annual fund raising event, the Country Fair. At the fair, there was one of those carnival games where you would try to toss a ping-pong ball into a small bowl with a swimming goldfish in it.

 

With his father’s help (when John was in his right mind), during his sixth grade year at the Country Fair Charles won something like a dozen of those goldfish. With his mother’s blessing (grateful that Charles had found the start of what would become his passion), Charles set up an aquarium at home for the goldfish. Spawned by the goldfish, the boy’s interests soon gravitated to tropical fish and, ultimately, six aquariums.

 

At the age of thirteen, Charles knew not only the common names of all of his tropical fish, but their Latin names and where in the world they could be found. The following year (at fourteen) he started taking scuba diving lessons, becoming the youngest member of a local diving club that was usually reserved for older teens and adults.

 

Charles would go on to getting his college degree in marine sciences from the University of Puget Sound and then attending the noted Brooks Institute of Photography to study underwater photography. He would go on to working with some of the best aquariums in the United States, including Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium and Washington State’s Pt. Defiance Zoo & Aquarium. He went on to write two books and numerous scholarly articles. He was labeled as the Creator of Distinctive Underwater Photography.