What was going on when I was born?

THEIR mothers may have thought it was essential to start married life with complete sets of silver, crystal and china, but the brides of 1980 often have other priorities.

Thomas Hunt Wyman, vice chairman of the Pillsbury Company and a top executive with a long string of management successes, was reported last night to have been chosen as the next president of CBS. His appointment was expected to be announced today.

WASHINGTON, May 21 (AP) The nation's manufacturers reported a steep 4.2 percent drop in orders for durable goods in April. It was the third consecutive monthly decline and more evidence that the nation's economy has been weakened by recession.

WATER MILL, L.I. "MR. Blending Builds His Dream House" remember it? A hilarious, enormously popular 1948 movie that was all too close to home. It starred Cary Grant and Myrna Loy stumbling from one disaster to another as they grappled ...

Mayor Koch killed any possibility of a state takeover of the Rikers Island detention complex yesterday by withdrawing his support for the proposal. Such a plan, once warmly endorsed by the city, had been in jeopardy for some time.

"IT'S the wave of the present," said Wade Green, a writer who built a greenhouse to heat his home on Nantucket Island, Mass. Mr. Green estimated that his $1,000 greenhouse provided about 60 percent of the heat for his family's three-bedroom house.

NEW HAVEN With a history of labor relations between Yale University and its union employees that was "horrendous by any standard," in the words of John Wilhelm, the union's business manager, representatives of the union had little reason to expect anything other than the usual bitter strike when their contract expired next December.

WASHINGTON, May 21 Bloodied and a little bowed, the Federal Trade Commission finally got a new lease on life today.

Ronald Reagan, with the delegates needed for the Republican Presidential nomination now certain after the Michigan and Oregon primaries on Tuesday, was meeting resistance yesterday to tentative moves by his campaign for a takeover of the Republican National Committee's operations. He also showed new weakness in losing soundly to George Bush in Michigan.

KWANGJU, South Korea, May 21--Tens of thousands of demonstrators, many waving seized rifles, iron bars, axes, pitchforks and even light machine guns, took control of this southwestern city today, the fourth day of anti-Government rioting that has cost the lives of at least 32 people.