What was going on when I was born?

VALDEZ, Alaska, Oct. 6 The sea was rough as the cruise ship Prinsendam plowed through the Gulf of Alaska on the third day of a monthlong cruise that was to take more than 300 passengers, most of them elderly Americans, through the glacial waters of Alaska's Inside Passage across the Pacific to Japan, China and the sun-drenched islands of Indonesia.

A NUMBER of radiation specialists are becoming increasingly concerned that the most damaging exposure of some Americans to radioactivity occurs in their own homes from accumulations of radon, a short-lived decay product of radium that seeps sometimes infinitesimally and at other times significantly from stone walls and soil.

ITHACA, N.Y. IN an age of narrowing specialization, Thomas Gold never seems to settle into one neat scientific slot. The centrifugal force of a quick, ranging mind keeps him in perpetual intellectual motion. He goes where his ideas take him, and they take him soaring on some original and controversial trajectories (some say tangents) through science.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 The United States has quietly tightened its procedures for granting visas to Japanese citizens who are sent by their companies to work in the many Japaneseowned installations in the United States, such as Honda plants in Ohio and Bank of Tokyo offices in New York.

The 1980 census figures show that a decades-long population boom has ended for the suburban communities closest to New York City and that some of them have actually started to lose residents.

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Oct. 6--The Government of Jordan ordered mobilization of all transport vehicles today to carry food and supplies to the Iraqi Army, becoming the first Arab nation actively and openly to support Iraq in its war against Iran.

DEARBORN, Oct. 6 The Ford Motor Company followed the lead of the General Motors Corporation today and raised prices on all but its smallest and largest 1981 model cars by an average of 2.3 percent, or the equivalent of $193 per car.

WARSAW, Oct. 6 After two days of hot and bitter debate, the Polish Communist Party's Central Committee purged eight of its members this morning and adopted a call for change in the party and greater democracy in the country.

The largest anthropological exhibition ever undertaken by the American Museum of Natural History in its 111-year history will open Oct. 17.

"THIS is not utopia," laments a certain graffito on a wall at Scarsdale High School, a place blessed with the sort of suburban affluence that would make many outsiders take exception with the message.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 The Supreme Court stepped into the middle of two of the most far-reaching disputes over the scope of Federal regulatory authority occupational health and strip mining as it opened its 1980-81 term today.