JUNE 16, 1959

GUNSMOKE IS TV'S top gun, leading a top-three posse of Westerns that includes Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel. Gunsmoke would marshal a 20-year run before cancellation in 1975. IN MOVIE THEATERS, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon get dolled up in Billy Wilder's classic Some Like It Hot. During the production, Marilyn Monroe's constant tardiness provokes Curtis to quip that kissing her is ''like kissing Hitler.'' READERS fall in love with Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, later a 1965 film starring heartthrob Omar Sharif. In the '90s, Sharif, a casino mogul, has a South Korean cigarette named for him (''The taste of my cigarettes is very smooth, soft and sensual, just like my romantic life,'' he boasts on the packet). AND IN THE REAL WORLD, three agencies report a tally of almost 530 cases of racial violence in the South after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation five years earlier.