No More Waiting (Jan. 5): A group of Paris intellectuals and society people attend the premiere performance of "Waiting for Godot" by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Many patrons in attendance find the existential drama, in which two tramps muse about life, odd and even a joke. But theater critics immediately hail the work as masterpiece.

Salk

Polio Breakthrough (March 26): Dr. Jonas Salk announces the discovery of a new vaccine to combat polio. Mass inoculations will begin the next year.

Because It's There (May 29): Mountaineer Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tensing Norgay, his Nepalese Sherpa guide, become the first men to conquer Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain.

Executed for Espionage (June 19): Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, N.Y. Convicted of selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, they became the first, and only, civilians executed under the General Espionage Act of 1917.

Quiet in Korea (July 27): Fighting ends in Korea after three years. Combatants sign an armistice, but a peace treaty is never signed. An estimated 55,000 Americans have been killed and 102,000 wounded.

Fairytale Wedding (Sept. 12): Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts weds Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, R.I., in what some call the wedding of the decade.

5 in a Row (Oct. 5): The New York Yankees win the World Series for an unprecedented fifth straight year, beating the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's the 16th championship for the Yanks. (Ticket prices are raised to $10 for box seats, $7 for reserved and $4 for standing room.)

Poetic Death (Nov. 9): Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who counseled, "Do not go gentle into that good night," dies at age 39 after a night of drinking in New York.

Matter of Antitrust (Nov. 9): The Supreme Court upholds a 1922 ruling that major league baseball is exempt from federal antitrust laws.