What was going on when I was born?

TRENTON ON THOSE mornings when Donna Lawrence makes the 30-minute drive from her home in Hamilton Square to her job as a nurse at the Mercer Medical Center, she takes along her 4-year-old daughter, Kristin. At 7:45, she leaves Kristin at the Mercer Children's Center, a mile from the hospital.

HARTFORD THE argument over taxes fre quently takes two forms, depending on one's point of view: 1. Connecticut raises money in a cruel fashion, and as a result

MOSCOW LENIN STADIUM, where the multicolored Olympic rings had just been raised above slogans that say, "Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," was not full of spectators the way it was yesterday at the opening ceremonies of the XXII Olympic Summer Games.

WASHINGTON, July 19--The Justice Department learned in May that the Libyan Government hoped to gain political influence inside the White House by paying off the President's brother, according to Government officials familiar with the case.

Washington Heights-Inwood, perhaps best known for The Cloisters, Morris Jumel Mansion and vast expanses of parklands, is fast emerging as one of the city's busiest neighborhoods of housing rehabilitation.

"BELLEFLEUR" is the most ambitious book to come so far from that alarming phenomenon Joyce Carol Oates. However one may carp, the novel is proof, if any seems ...

DETROIT, July 19--After two generations of almost unchallenged growth that made it a marvel of the industrial world, the American auto industry is being tested against rising fuel prices, fuel shortages, inflation and competition from abroad, developments that have plunged ...

In the days, 20 years ago and more, before I came to know Europe well, and long before I came here to live, I used to search through travel guides for obscure but interesting places. In one such, I read about an island with the fascinating name of Aero, a capital called Aeroskobing and enough charm to soften a misanthrope.

IT WAS inevitable. Any plan as sweeping as the one drafted by the 15-member Pinelands Com mission to control growth in the 1.1 million-acre area--it calls for removing land-use regulations from local control and creating an administrative bureaucracy--was bound to cause controversy.

This week--and it's enough to make anyone feel old--"A Chorus Line" celebrates the fifth anniversary of its Broadway premiere. How could that be? It doesn't seem so long ago that this show was in previews at the Public Theater, generating so much word-ofmouth that it became a hit before a single review was published.

Hans Joachim Morgenthau, the author, teacher and political scientist who gained national attention in the 1960's as a leading critic of American involvement in Vietnam, died last night in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan after a short illness. He was 76 years old.