What was going on when I was born?

Gene Michael, the Yankees' rookie manager, didn't waste any time finding the home run button at Yankee Stadium. On opening day Thursday, Michael professed to be nervous, but he managed to keep his finger on the button long enough for Bucky Dent to hit a three-run homer and for Bobby Murcer to hit a pinch-hit grand slam. Obviously calmer yesterday, the manager pushed the button three times in the first three innings, and Graig Nettles, Willie Randolph and Oscar Gamble responded with homers that powered the Yankees past the Texas Rangers, 5-1. Tommy John, despite his wildness, benefited from the homer barrage Thursday, and Rudy May, a bit nervous, was the beneficiary yesterday as he added a victory to the eight-game winning streak with which he completed the regular season last year. Rich Gossage made his first 1981 appearance by pitching the ninth inning and he pitched it the way he pitched most of the time last year - awesomely. He retired Buddy Bell on a fly to right field and he struck out Billy Sample and Johnny Grubb.

IT may not be like the glorious 60's, when a driver could buy a half tank of gasoline for pocket money, with balloons, beer mugs or soda pop thrown in. But for the long suffering American motorist, his psyche scarred in recent years by periodic shortages and relentless price increases, it's welcome relief indeed. All over the country, gas stations in the last few weeks have been shaving prices in response to what almost everybody but oil executives is calling a glut. The outlook for the summer driving season, barring a major supply interruption, hasn't been so bright in years. Although there's little reason to expect that prices will drop substantially, there are signs at least that the upward spiral has stalled for now. The softening, while limited, stands in contrast to the sharp jump in prices during the first quarter. President Reagan's decontrol of domestic crude oil prices added perhaps 10 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline this year. Increases from a price rise in December by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries contributed a similar amount, and several states are pushing the price up by increasing gas taxes.

''IN the case of the shuttle, you don't fly without the computer system,'' an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said recently. That is perhaps the simplest explanation of what happened last week. To the chagrin of NASA technicians wary of failures in machinery, it was a computer glitch that kept the space shuttle Columbia's 4.5-million-pound, 184-foottall bulk firmly earthbound on Friday. The disappointment was palpable among the million or so spectators at Cape Canaveral, Fla., as the space agency decided to delay the historic flight at least 48 hours - time enough, it turned out, for engineers to track down the problem and correct it, and for agency officials to schedule another launching attempt for this morning. Columbia's astronauts, John W. Young and Navy Capt. Robert L. Crippen, flew jet training landings yesterday, and a new countdown was begun late in the day despite at least one remaining uncertainty - the weather, which had turned cloudy and threatened the possibility of further postponement.

Barring Soviet military intervention, the likely next phase in the workers' revolution in Poland will not be a struggle against the Communist Party but a struggle within the party itself. The outcome will be crucial -probably more important than anything that has happened so far - in determining how far Poland will go in its remarkable dash for more freedom and democracy. The shape of the struggle is clear as the party prepares for elections for delegates to an extraordinary party congress. If the party is allowed to hold the congress, which is supposed to occur before July 20, the current leadership will almost certainly be swept away and a new group installed, liberal and reform-minded beyond anything Eastern Europe has seen. The country's path toward a kind of really ''democratic'' socialism will be fixed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- George Howe Colt is a freelance writer with a special interest in theater. By GEORGE HOWE COLT One evening recently, Mickey Rooney, the star of ''Sugar Babies,'' invited a friend to see the long-running musical at the Mark Hellinger - from center stage. In the middle of a sketch, Mr. Rooney, playing a disgruntled hotel patron, skittered out of a doorway, suitcase in one hand, surprise guest in the other. Mr. Rooney's friend yanked up his T-shirt, stuck out his tongue and leered into the footlights. The actor playing the hotel clerk, who had the next line, flinched, but recovered quickly: ''Pardon me, sir, I didn't know you had company,'' he called out as Mr. Rooney hustled his friend Buddy Hackett offstage. Just when the cast of ''Sugar Babies'' thought they had seen it all, Mr. Rooney had slipped them another surprise and put everyone on their toes once more.

JERSEY CITY THE CITIES - This is the second article in a series on the decline of the state's major cities and their prospects for recovery IN THIS grubby old town, crammed into 16 square miles of uneven peninsula across the river from Manhattan, people seem to be betting their futures on the past. It just might work. There is a tremendous quality of anachronism about Jersey City, a former rail, ferry and manufacturing hub that lives on in reduced circumstances without the things that were once its reason for being. Its neighborhoods are insular, its streets chaotic, its land scarred and uneven. Yet it lives on.

MAMARONECK THIS is ''fitting out'' time, and for the next few weeks Westchester's boaters will be up to their elbows in paint, canvas, cordage and rigging, getting their craft ready. They have no intention of being caught with their anchors down when the weather becomes fit for running with the winds and putt-putting with the tides. Despite the rising costs of boating, chief among them the soaring price of gasoline, interest in the sport continues unabated in the county. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, which issues registrations for power boats 15 feet or longer, reported that 10,092 boats were registered in 1980. Although that represents a drop from 1979's figure of 10,442, early reports suggest that registrations in the 1981 season will equal last year's. And these figures do not reflect the several thousand sailboats and many small power boats in Westchester waters, which do not have to be registered. Although season docking fees at marinas in the county have not risen substantially since last season - they average about $25 per foot on the Hudson River and closer to $30 on the Long Island Sound - the price of gasoline is now hovering around $1.50 a gallon. But the marinas have not seen a serious drop in the sales of powerboats.

On April 23, 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan's ''Patience'' received its world premiere at the Opera Comique Theater in London. This Wednesday ''Patience'' settles in for a short run - through April 26 - at the East Side Playhouse on East 74th Street. Which means that the Light Opera of Manhattan, known to the world as LOOM, will be staging ''Patience'' exactly on the centennial, to the joy of the town's Savoyards, and also to the joy of those who might be encountering this enchanting operetta for the first time. But LOOM is not the only G&S group honoring the centenary. At Symphony Space, 95th Street and Broadway, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players are currently giving eleven performances of ''Patience,'' ending on May 3. Gilbert and Sullivan have never lost popularity, but recent decades have brought a strange shift in emphasis. There was a time when the keeper of the flame, the D'Oyly Carte Light Opera Company, made regular visits to the United States, at which time all of the operettas were given. But those days have gone. The last few American tours of the D'Oyly Carte saw the repertory trimmed down to four or five sure-fire items, of which the Big Three were ''HMS Pinafore,'' ''The Mikado'' and ''The Pirates of Penzance.'' Now the existence of the D'Oyly Carte is threatened, and if it vanishes a repository of G&S tradition also will vanish.

Twelve days after he was shot in the chest in an assassination attempt, President Reagan returned to the White House this morning. Looking a little pale and walking somewhat stiffly, the President told reporters he felt ''great,'' grinned broadly and gave a tentative wave with his left arm, which has been difficult to move because of his wound. Aides and their families stood applauding and cheering in the rain. The President got back to the White House just as Congress began its Easter recess after completing the first phase of its consideration of Mr. Reagan's economic program.

MANCHESTER PINNED to the bulletin board on the first floor of the Manchester Town Hall is a proclamation by Governor O'Neill on the state's observance of Good Friday this week. ''The American people have never been islands unto themselves,'' it states. Last week, such a sentiment had special relevance for Manchester, where, after two years, the town was a few days away from beginning a trial in which it would be the defendant and the United States Government a plaintiff. The town and a dozen of its officials were preparing for the start of their trial on Tuesday in the Federal Courthouse in nearby Hartford, in a civil case in which the Federal Government alleged that the town's decision - confirmed by two later referendums - to drop out of the Federal Community Development Block Grant Program after four years of participation was ''motivated by the town's strong desire to maintain itself as a racially exclusive community.''

THE MEN'S CLUB By Leonard Michaels. 181 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.95. LEONARD MICHAELS'S somewhat controversial reputation as a writer of fiction - confined until now to a fairly highbrow readership - has been based on two collections of short stories: ''Going Places'' (1969) and the more ambitious ''I Would Have Saved Them If I Could'' (1975). These stories seem very much of their period: hip-urban-Jewish in sensibility, full of casual violence, nerve-scraping New York encounters and trivialized or debased sex, late-modernist in their fragmented plot-refusing structures, and excessively literary in their inspiration. What is most interesting about them is a stylistic quality, a mode of phrasing that seems perfectly contemporary while at the same time echoing - in its wry, unexpected and slightly skewed locutions - the voice of a chiding Jewish parent in the background. Though obviously the work of a bright and talented writer, many of the stories seem to have dated rather badly; their substance is too thin, their mode too nervously self-conscious, for them to have withstood successfully the erosion of certain attitudes and literary mannerisms that we associate with the late 1960's.

For a fleeting moment, Vice President Bush recalls, he thought he might have to assume the Presidency on the day President Reagan was shot. But he quickly quelled the thought and for the past 12 days has striven to project the continuity of the Reagan Administration without appearing to be a surrogate President. ''I can't say it never crossed my mind, to be honest with you,'' the Vice President said, recalling his inital reaction when given the word of the shooting on March 30. ''But I never dwelt on it or I never sat through a period of uncertainty thinking, gosh, am I going to have to assume the duties of being President of the United States. ''The facts were never presented to me in that way,'' he said. ''Nor did my mind or imagination, when there was a lot of uncertainty, run in that direction. I guess it was because the first report was that he wasn't shot. Then we heard he'd walked in under his own steam. The question was more, what do you do to be helpful in a situation like this, than one of these lonely, awesome-burden seances you hear about.''