What was going on when I was born?

HARTFORD, July 9--Connecticut cannot prevent the major oil companies from passing through to customers in the state the $60 million cost of a new 2 percent tax on the companies' gross receipts, a Federal District Court judge ruled today.

DETROIT, July 9--The General Motors Corporation, despite its criticism of Government-mandated fuel-economy standards, announced today that it planned to market a line of 1985 model cars averaging 31 miles a gallon, three and a half better than the 27.5 miles a gallon required.

DETROIT, July 9--The platform committee of the Republican National Convention refused today to repeat the party's endorsement of the proposed Federal equal rights amendment. But it added a mollifying concession to the plank adopted yesterday by a subcommittee, saying that efforts to ban discrimination against women were "legitimate."

CHICAGO, July 9--Ben W. Heineman had his hands full recently in sorting out the top management problems at the First National Bank of Chicago, where he is chairman of the executive committee.

Mayor Koch's attack this week on a United State Supreme Court decision affirming Congress's right to establish racial quotas to combat discrimination directly contradicted a brief filed--with the Mayor's approval--by the city's Corporation Counsel in the same case last fall.

DETROIT, July 9--Some Republicans are telling one another, and anyone else who will listen, that the final stand their party takes on the proposed Federal equal rights amendment may decide the ...

WASHINGTON, July 9--Consumers cut their borrowing by a record $3.43 billion in May, the Federal Reserve Board reported today.

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 9--Moslem insurgents raided a Soviet military camp north of here early Sunday, reportedly causing heavy casualties, and a Soviet force of 400 tanks and armored personnel carriers, artillery, jet fighters and helicopter gunships was said to have struck back with three days of attacks in the region.

Harper's magazine, at the brink of extinction after 130 years of publication, was saved yesterday when two prominent foundations bought the literary and political monthly. They will operate it as a nonprofit enterprise.

EAST NASSAU, N.Y. "THIS place is a monument to garbage," said 28-year-old Donald G. Carpentier, mastermind, builder and "squire" of Eastfield Village, an authentic recreation of a late 18th-century American community 11 miles east of Albany.

GRANDVIEW, Idaho--Giant underground missile silos here once housed the deadly Titan 1 nuclear missiles. Today the same remote facility in the southern Idaho desert is the final resting place for thousands of tons of deadly chemicals.

NABLUS, Israeli-Occupied West Bank, July 9--Mayor Bassam al-Shaka of Nablus, who lost both legs when a bomb exploded in his car June 2, came home today from several weeks of medical treatment in Jordan to a tumultuous welcome from hundreds of young Palestinians who mobbed his ambulance and chanted themselves into a frenzy.