1917 births

Caroline Clendening Laise (November 14, 1917 – July 25, 1991) was an American civil servant, ambassador to Nepal and the first female Assistant Secretary of State.

Eugene Beauharnais Sydnor Jr. (September 25, 1917 – September 9, 2003) was a Richmond department store owner, Chamber of Commerce executive, and politician. A member of the Byrd Organization, Sydnor served briefly in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly: from 1953 to 1955 in the House of Delegates and from 1955 until 1959 in the Virginia Senate. Both occurred during the period of Massive Resistance to the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Gregers Winther Wulfsberg Gram (15 December 1917 – 13 November 1944) was a Norwegian resistance fighter and saboteur. A corporal and later second lieutenant in the Norwegian Independent Company 1 (Norwegian: Kompani Linge) during the Second World War, he was killed in 1944.

Lettie Hamlett Rogers (1917 – May 14, 1957) was an American novelist and educator.
She was born in Suzhou, central China, the daughter of missionary parents. She spent her childhood in China and Japan. After graduating from high school at the Shanghai American School she came to the United States to attend Woman's College of the University of North (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). Rogers received a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1940, and accepted a position as an assistant in the Sociology Department the following year. She shared a home with faculty members Lyda Gordon Shivers and Mereb Mossman. Two years later she left her position, but remained in North Carolina where she devoted herself full-time to her writing.
In 1948 Rogers returned to the Woman's College as an assistant professor in the English Department to teach creative writing. In 1955 she resigned in protest of the College administration's censure of the staff of the campus arts journal, Coraddi, for publishing a nude male figure drawn by art student Lee Hall (later to become head of the Rhode Island School of Design).
Rogers was well known in North Carolina literary circles. She published four novels, South of Heaven (Random House, 1946), The Storm Cloud (Random House, 1951), Landscape of the Heart (Random House, 1953), and Birthright (Simon & Schuster, 1957). She also wrote one unpublished novel, Murder in the College Degree (1940), under the name "Lettie Logan." The story is set on a fictionalized woman's college campus with faculty members from the history and psychology departments serving as detectives to help local police.

William (Bill) Colvig (March 13, 1917 – March 1, 2000) was an electrician and amateur musician who was the partner for 33 years of composer Lou Harrison, whom he met in San Francisco in 1967. Colvig helped construct the American gamelan used in works such as the puppet opera Young Caeser [sic] (1971), La Koro Sutro (1972), and the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1974).

Arbee William Stidham (February 9, 1917 – April 26, 1988) was an American blues singer and multi-instrumentalist.
According to the authors of the book All Music Guide to the Blues: The Definitive Guide to the Blues, Stidham was "exactly the sort of singer that thrived in the R&B or 'race' market after World War II; although essentially a bluesman, he wasn't a blues purist... his mixture of blues, jazz and gospel made him quite popular... in the '40s and '50s".

Sergeant Major Huelet Leo "Joe" Benner (November 1, 1917 – December 12, 1999) was an American multi-discipline pistol shooter during what many consider the golden era of international and national competition (post-World War II through the mid-1960s). He was a member of three U.S. Olympic teams (1948, 1952, and 1956).

Dixon Howard "Dick" Hogan (November 27, 1917 – August 18, 1995) was an American actor of the 1930s and 1940s. During his 12-year career he appeared in over three dozen films, in roles which varied from unnamed bellhops to featured and starring roles. His final film performance was as the murder victim in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).

Esther Victoria Cooper Jackson (August 21, 1917 – August 23, 2022) was an American civil rights activist, social worker, and communist activist. She worked with Shirley Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Strong, and Louis E. Burnham, and was one of the founding editors of the magazine Freedomways, a theoretical, political and literary journal published from 1961 to 1985. She also served as organizational and executive secretary at the Southern Negro Youth Congress.

William Reynold Brown (October 18, 1917 – August 24, 1991) was an American realist artist who painted many Hollywood film posters. He was also briefly active as a comics artist.