What was going on when I was born?

This is the second of a two-part series on office-building development in the metropolitan region.

E. Sheffield Nelson is 39 years old. Finn M.W. Caspersen is 38, Michael J. Collins, 35, Andrew Tisch, 30, and Richard D. Schultz, just 29. Each is a chief executive, running a company at an age when most business people are still groping about in the anonymous ranks of middle management.

DUBLIN Sean O'Casey was born a hundred years ago, on March 30, 1880, in Dublin, a city which at the time had the worst slums and the highest infant mortality rate in Europe: he was the youngest of 13 children, and at the time of his birth eight had already died.

WASHINGTON Joan Miro, who will observe his 87th birthday on April 20 and whose work is currently the subject of exhibitions in Washington and St. Louis, has enjoyed one of the longest and most distin guished careers in the annals of 20th-century art. There can be little question but that he ...

FOR more than a decade Doris Lessing has been energetically breaking the bonds of the realistic novel, which she once regarded as the highest form of prose writing. Repeatedly--in "The Four-Gated City," "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell," "The Memoirs of a Survivor"--she has ventured into eschatological prophecy, into explorations of madness and ESP, into Blakean fantasies of man's fallen state.

AT 60, Doris Lessing appears to have lost none of her vigor. When we met during London's dismal winter, she had just moved 200 yards down the road, from a small flat to a large Victorian house. We spoke in her study at the top of the house, still in disarray, with books piled on the floor.

WASHINGTON, March 29--Cities that once thought themselves immune are likely to be stricken with the revenue shortages and labor difficulties that have recently plagued a number of large Northeastern and Middle Western cities, urban experts say.

CLEARWATER, Fla. March 29--If the baseball players strike, Tom Seaver says, he will take his family on vacation to London or Paris. If the players strike, Ron Guidry says, he will go home to Louisiana and fish for bass.

WASHINGTON, March 29--Iran made public today the text of a purported conciliatory message from President Carter to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The White House firmly denied that the President or anyone else in the United States ...

It took one back to the days of the Penn Central in 1970 and the Franklin National Bank in 1974. A sudden unleashing of bad news from an unexpected quarter sent an already shaky stock market into a tailspin.

HUNTINGTON IT seems like a fantasy now, but less than 10 years ago there was a Texaco gasoline station on Old Country Road in Garden City that charged 27.9 cents a gallon for regular. And--as an added incentive in those days of hot price wars--the buyer who ...