Hugh Hefner opens the first Playboy Club (with Bunnies) in Chicago. The model for the Bunny suit (thought to have the ideal Bunny shape) was Suzy Leigh, 5-foot-2 with measurements of 37-23-32.
Demolition of Ebbets Field begins. It had been the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers before the team moved to Los Angeles before the 1958 season. It was here in 1947 that Jackie Robinson made his debut as the first black major-leaguer. 
The Games open in tiny Squaw Valley, California, near Lake Tahoe. They are the first Winter Olympics to be televised in the United States, and would be the springboard for "instant replay," after judges ask CBS if they could review a videotape (they were checking to see whether a skier had missed a gate or not).
France becomes the world's fourth nuclear power -- along with the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain -- when it explodes a atomic bomb in the skies above the Sahara Desert in Algeria (even as the Algerian war for independence was going on). The test was code-named "Gerboise Bleue," or "blue jerboa," a jerboa being a type of desert rat. France's president, Charles de Gaulle, said afterward, "Hurrah for France! Since this morning, she is stronger and prouder."
Construction begins on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It honors achievements in five categories: movies, TV, music, radio and theater. 
Not included in this ad: the Comet, Fairlane, Ranchero and the Country Squire station wagon, among others.
The network of prison labor camps (nearly 500) dated back to just after World War I. It's estimated that up to 18 million people -- mostly non-Communists, criminals and "enemies of the state" -- were sent to the gulag, with perhaps up to 3 million dying. Millions more were deported or exiled within Russia, or sent to labor colonies.
With two men aboard, the deep-diving submersible vehicle Trieste -- a bathyscaphe -- submerges to the deepest known part of any ocean on Earth, descending some 36,000 feet, or nearly seven miles, in the Challenger Deep area of the Mariana Trench, near Guam. The trip down takes nearly 5 hours, the trip back up 3 hours 15 minutes. 
The movie "Scent of Mystery" premieres, employing a gimmick called Smell-O-Vision, where certain smells were released during corresponding onscreen moments (via tubes under each seat). The setup was expensive, the film was a flop, and no other movies were made using Smell-O-Vision. Said comedian Henny Youngman: "I didn't understand the picture. I had a cold." At left is "Scent" producer Mike Todd Jr. with Hans Laube, who developed the technique. 
With Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower leaving office, the two-term vice president officially becomes a candidate. It's Nixon's 47th birthday and concludes a week in which he was grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade, helped negotiate an end to the U.S. steel strike and flew aboard a plane that set a record for fastest commercial coast-to-coast flight (3 hours and 39 minutes).
