Compiled by Jessica Jones from internet sources

~October~

Baseball player Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run in the last game of the season, against the Boston Red Sox, beating the 34-year-old record held by Babe Ruth. The homer was made at 1:46 p.m. at Yankee Stadium, off of Boston pitcher Tracy Stallard, in the game's fourth inning. The run won the game, 1-0. Sal Durante, a 19 year old spectator, got the baseball and won $5,000 and other prizes.

Died: Donald Cook, 60, American actor; and David Pratt, 54, South African farmer who shot and wounded South African Prime MinisterHendrik Verwoerd in April 1960, by suicide.

WETA-TV, the first public television station in Washington, D.C., went on air.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, starring Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, was shown for the first time, making its debut at 8 p.m. EST on CBS. Although the show would go on to become very popular, the initial telecast, competing against Bachelor Father (ABC) and Laramie (NBC) attracted so few viewers that it was not even among the Top 70 most popular programs that week.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which gives its stamp of approval and restrictions on American films, changed its production code, declaring that "In keeping with the culture, the mores and the values of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care, discretion and restraint," adding that such "aberrations" "could be suggested but not actually spelled out". The change was believed to have been prompted by the filming of the Allen Drury novel Advise and Consent.

Police in McComb, Mississippi, arrested and jailed 113 African-American high school and junior high school students, after the group walked out of Burgland High School and marched to City Hall, protesting the expulsion of two students who had participated in a sit-in earlier in the year.

Maurice Papon, the Paris Chief of Police, issued an ethnic-specific curfew against all "Muslim Algerian workers" within the jurisdiction of his prefecture, even though they were considered citizens of France. The curfew order decreed that the Muslims were "advised most urgently" to stay indoors between 8:30 pm and 5:30 am. A protest by 30,000 of the affected persons twelve days later led to the Paris massacre of 1961.

Booker Little, 23, jazz musician (complications resulting from uremia); and Don Barbour, 34, vocalist of the jazz vocal group "The Four Freshmen" (killed in an auto accident).

The "Schießbefehl" (literally, "order to shoot") was formally issued by General Heinz Hoffmann, the Minister of National Defense for East Germany, spelling out the rules for shooting anyone who attempted to escape from the German Democratic Republic. After a shouted warning and the firing of a warning shot, guards were ordered to fire their weapons at persons clearly planning "to violate the state frontier".

The television medical drama Ben Casey premiered on ABC and ran for five seasons. Nine days earlier, Dr. Kildare, a medical drama adapted from a radio series, began its run on NBC.

The first of at least 134 residents of East Berlin escaped to the West through a manhole that led to an underground sewer that ran underneath the Berlin Wall. West German students Dieter Thieme and Detlef Girmann organized the Unternehmen Reisebüro, also called the "Girmann Group". The operation lasted for four nights until East German police learned what was happening and closed off the route.

The New York Yankees won the World Series in the 5th game, defeating the Cincinnati Reds, 13-5, to take baseball's championship 4 games to 1.

In upholding the constitutionality of the 1950 Subversive Activites Control Act, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Communist Party of the United States of America would be required to register as an agent of the Soviet Union, and to reveal its membership list and finances. CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall said that the Party would refuse to comply.

Born: Liz Sagal and Jean Sagal, the "Doublemint Twins", American actresses, in Los Angeles, California.

The day after stockholders approved a merger of two companies, the Martin Marietta Corporation was created from the merger of aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, and the chemical manufacturer American-Marietta Corporation, and went on to become one of the 100 largest corporations in the United States.

The United States presence in South Vietnam was increased as President Kennedy authorized the deployment of an entire U.S. Air Force unit, the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron, to fly combat missions from the Bien Hoa Air Base.

In a press conference at the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Alabama, Future Projects Office Director H. H. Koelle delivered the Space Flight Report to the Nation, predicting that commercial space flights to and from the moon could begin as early as 1975, with a permanent moonbase by 1970 and manned expeditions to other planets beginning in 1972.

Died: Eugene Bullard, 67, the first African-American combat pilot, who served with the French Foreign Legion during World War One, and Maria Valtorta, 64, Italian writer who wrote of her visions of Mary and Jesus.

Marjorie Michelmore, a 26 year old volunteer for the Peace Corps, caused an international incident when she accidentally dropped a postcard that she had intended to send to a friend back in the United States. The card, which read in part, "we were really not prepared for the squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions rampant both in the cities and the bush", was found by a student, mimeographed and distributed, and led to protests by university students against the presence of the Corps. However, another volunteer recalled later, "A dialogue began between students and the Volunteers—more valuable than if the incident had not taken place.

For twelve hours, all commercial flights in the United States and Canada were grounded in order to conduct the NORAD exercise Operation Sky Shield II. Starting, as scheduled, at 1 p.m. Washington DC time, civilian airline flights were halted and military planes conducted an exercise simulating a foreign bombing attack on North American targets. Commercial flights were allowed to take off again twelve hours later. It was the longest scheduled halt of air traffic in United States history, exceeded only by the emergency grounding following Sept. 11, 2001.

A massive search commenced for "Pogo 22", a USAF B-52G Stratofortress and its crew of eight, after the bomber failed to return from its mission as part of the Operation Sky Shield II exercise. Neither the bomber, the only one of more than 2,250 that flew that day, nor its crew, was ever found. Although the incident has been cited as "the first time a jet aircraft disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle", contact with the bomber was lost near Newfoundland, thousands of miles north of the Bermuda Triangle.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the cookbook that would become a bestseller and catapult Julia Child to worldwide fame, was published for the first time. Child's co-authors on the Alfred A. Knopf release were Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

Paris massacre of 1961: French police in Paris attacked about 30,000 protesting a curfew applied solely to Algerian Muslims. The actual death toll was suppressed for more than three decades until the man who had ordered the crackdown, Police Chief Maurice Papon, was put on trial in 1988 for collaboration with Nazi occupiers during World War II. There were 11,538 arrests, with the detainees held in stadiums on the outskirts of the city. The bodies of 74 of the victims were thrown into the Seine River and washed up on its banks later, while another 68 simply disappeared.

The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was opened in Moscow by CPSU First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who made a 6 hour, 20 minute speech. Khrushchev dropped his threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany before year's end, bringing an end to the Berlin Crisis of 1961. He announced that the Soviets would explode a 50 megaton bomb before the months end, and claimed that the Soviets had a 100 megaton bomb that would not be tested because "we might break our own windows". He criticized Albania's Communist leader, Enver Hoxha of the Albanian Labor Party, for creating a personality cult, and predicted Communism's triumph by 1980; and he denounced many of the former leaders of the U.S.S.R. for furthering the terror of Josef Stalin. Condemned by name were former President Kliment Voroshilov, former Foreign Ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Dmitri Shepilov, former Prime Ministers Georgi Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin, and former First Deputy Premiers Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Pervukhin and Maksim Saburov.

The film West Side Story was released, with its world premiere at New York City's Rivoli Theatre. It would go on to become the highest grossing film of 1962, and would win ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

In a speech to business executives in Hot Springs, Virginia, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatri revealed that there was no "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that the U.S. actually had the superior nuclear strike force. Gilpatric was authorized by President Kennedy to make the announcement, in response to Soviet Premier Khrushchev's statements four days earlier, stating in part, "we have a second strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first," adding "their Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin's boasts." At the same time, Gilpatric's speech revealed to the Soviets that the U.S. intelligence had discovered the Soviet shortcomings, and "provoked an embarrassing defeat for Khrushchev's reform program".

Chubby Checker performed his 1960 #1 hit, "The Twist" on the Ed Sullivan Show, reigniting the popularity of both the dance and the record. The song returned to the Top 100 three weeks later, and became the first and only hit single to reach #1 twice.

In New York, Thurgood Marshall, an African-American attorney was the chief legal adviser to the NAACP, was sworn in as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He would become the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice in 1967.

The Crucible, an English language opera written by Robert Ward, and based on the 1952 play by Arthur Miller, was given its first performance. It would win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962.

The Soviet Union detonated a 58-megaton yield hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya, in the largest man-made explosion ever. Too large to be fit inside even the largest available warplane, the weapon was suspended from a Tupolev Tu-95 piloted by A.E. Durnovtsev, a Hero of the Soviet Union. A parachute slowed the bomb's descent so that the airplane could have time to climb away from the fireball, and at an altitude of four kilometers, was exploded at 8:33 a.m. GMT. Although the news drew protests around the world, the event was not reported in the Soviet press.

Shortly after 10 p.m. in Moscow, Joseph Stalin's body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and reburied outside the Kremlin as part of his successor's policy of de-Stalinization

Born: Peter Jackson, New Zealand film director (The Lord of the Rings), in Pukerua Bay; and Larry Mullen, Jr., Irish drummer for U2, in Artane, Dublin.