August 17, 1969

1969Donnie Wahlberg, American singer-songwriter, actor and producer^[†]

Donald Edmond Wahlberg Jr. is an American singer, actor and producer. He is a founding member of the boy band New Kids on the Block. Outside music, he has starred in the TV drama series Blue Bloods as NYPD Detective Danny Reagan and has had roles in the Saw films, Zookeeper (2011), Dreamcatcher (2003), The Sixth Sense (1999), Righteous Kill (2008) and Ransom (1996), as well as the role of Carwood Lipton in the World War II miniseries Band of Brothers.

1969Otto Stern, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1888)^[†]

Otto Stern was a German-American physicist. He is the second most nominated person for a Nobel Prize, with 82 nominations during the years 1925–1945. In 1943, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton".

1969Category 5 Hurricane Camille hits the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 256 and causing $1.42 billion in damage.^[†]

The Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale (SSHWS) is a tropical cyclone intensity scale that classifies hurricanes—which in the Western Hemisphere are tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of tropical depressions and tropical storms—into five categories distinguished by the intensities of their sustained winds. This measuring system was formerly known as the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale, or SSHS.