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. 
