What was going on when I was born?

WASHINGTON--Sixteen years after the idea was broached, a proposal to split the Deep South's Fifth Federal judicial circuit, where many of the nation's key civil rights cases evolved, appears headed for Congressional enactment.

The first few words Luis Tiant had to say after yesterday's game were unprintable. Expletives spewed as he disappeared into the training room after the Yankees had lost, 1-0, to the Seattle Mariners.

JERSEY CITY, Aug. 31--Stanislaw Walesa stepped out into the sun in front of his brownstone here, puffed up his chest and breathed a heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a patriot happy with the turn of events in his native Poland, and it was the sigh of a father calm at last about the fate of his son.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31--A group of nine Democratic Senators has recommended that Congress create an industrial financing bank to provide capital to high-risk ventures in advanced-technology "sunrise" industries with promising potential for growth and export.

PAINTSVILLE, Ky. THE visionary of Paintsville sees a blue blazer hung upon a tree branch in the "holler." He sees the charcoal white in the barbecue pit where raw steaks grow brown and The Moonlighters gather in the shelter beneath the oak and pine.

"I'm speaking, I'm working, I'm trying to raise money," Senator Jacob K. Javits said the other day, summing up his schedule for the Sept. 9 primary in New York. "I know what happened to Clifford Case."

LOS ANGELES WHEN John Robinson became football coach at the University of Southern California in 1976, he started a counseling service for his players, apparently to improve their chances of receiving an education while performing at that school.

From the Roller Rock rink in Harlem to Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island, from the Hudson River pier at 44th Street to the former World's Fair post office building in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and Skatehampton, new this summer in Southampton, L.I.--the skating boom, which arrived in the New York area from California, grew out of reinventing the wheel.

For the first time since the early 1970's, when large-scale drug-addiction programs were being established, New York State's treatment facilities are being strained beyond their capaacity, according to state officials.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31--A new crop of women, emerging from local and state political victories of the 1970's, are now reaching for national office, and analysts in both parties say it is almost certain that more women will serve in Congress in 1981 than ever before.

BONN, Aug. 27--Despite the clouds gathering over the economy and growing election pressures, officials in Bonn and bankers in Frankfurt are staying with a policy of tight money. Paying West Germany's dramatically higher oil bills is taking top priority.

A two-year project in New York State intended to find jobs for relief recipients who are able to work has succeeded in getting 80 percent of those who participated off of the welfare rolls, according to the state Department of Social Services.