What was going on when I was born?

''It was too much blue sky,'' said Fred Tippen, president of Wonder Tan, an Atlanta-based company, when asked what happened to all those tanning parlors. ''Everybody thought it was easy money.'' Or talk to Rick Stevenson, president of Supertan, based in Arkansas: ''This is personal,'' he said, ''but I think franchising is the biggest rip-off in the world.'' In 1978, when the idea of tanning booth franchises was first marketed with vigor, the enterprise looked like an entrepreneur's dream. In two minutes, for a few dollars a visit, the public would get brown. And seemingly, for a franchise fee of $7,000 to $30,000, a few strips of plywood, some goggles, some ultraviolet tanning bulbs and a supply of reflective paper, the entrepreneurs needed only to wait for the profits to roll in.

IT used to be that you became a dancer by toiling away with unlimited hope and very limited money in the small private studios that dot New York. If you were lucky, you were accepted for advanced training at a school attached to a major company and gained a kind of inside track on employment. Today, however, aspiring dancers are increasingly turning to universities to learn their trade. And colleges are moving quickly to meet these needs.

This is a story of high-stakes corporate gambling by tight-lipped men in well-tailored suits. The stakes run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Promising ''playing cards'' are given the names of women, cocktails or automobile parts to mask their identities. Bagmen with access to very big money roam the city. ''We have all kinds of weapons in our arsenal for all kinds of purposes,'' one player averred, with the slightest of smiles.For all its romance, however, the game being played here is unlikely to arouse the suspicion of the authorities. Indeed, it has been openly endorsed by the Secretary of Interior, who has even suggested that it should be expanded tenfold over the next five years. Wagering Began 17 Years Ago The game is the auctioning of Federal real estate off the coast of the United States to oil and gas companies. Since the wagering began 17 years ago, companies have bet more than $30 billion to win a chance at spending billions more in search of underground riches.

International An Israeli drone was shot down in the vicinity of the Lebanese border by missiles fired from Syrian territory. It was at least the third Israeli pilotless craft that has been shot down since Syria moved missiles into Lebanon nearly four weeks ago. Page A1, Column 6. Moscow denied Israel's contention that Soviet advisers were accompanying Syrian army units into Lebanon. Responding to a statement by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the press agency Tass said that "there have been no Soviet advisers whatsoever in Lebanon, nor are there any now." A3:4-6.

Missiles fired from inside Syria brought down another pilotless Israeli reconnaissance aircraft in the vicinity of the Lebanese-Syrian border today. It was at least the third such aircraft shot down since Syria moved missiles into Lebanon nearly four weeks ago. A Syrian spokesman said that the drone had flown into Syrian airspace and had crashed near the town of Zebdani, northwest of Damascus. He said it was the sixth plane shot down.

Saudi Arabia said it would raise its $32-a-barrel oil price if other OPEC members lowered theirs. But at the cartel's semiannual ministerial meeting in Geneva, the other 12 members, which charge $36 to $41 a barrel, rejected the proposal to unify its pricing structure. Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, said he did not want to discuss production cuts at this meeting, cuts that the other countries contend are the key issue and essential to preventing further downward pressure on the prices of crude oil. (Page A1.)

o'-the-wisps and ball lightning - all have been snubbed by science as the imaginings of undisciplined minds. But ball lightning, at least, seems finally to have won a wide measure of scientific recognition as a physical reality. James Dale Barry, senior scientist at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Los Angeles, has studied ball lightning for the past two decades. After subjecting to scientific scrutiny some 1,800 reports and photographs of ball lightning collected from many places over the past 300 years, Mr. Barry has concluded that ball lightning probably exists.

In handing President Reagan a resounding budget victory, both the House of Representatives and the Senate also acted in accordance with the President's wishes to check the rapid growth of Federal borrowing, which many economists consider a major contributor to the rise in interest rates. While most attention has been focused on the Government's direct spending and receipts, the less visible off-budget deficit, incorporating Federal credit demands, has been cut back significantly in the parallel versions of bills from both chambers. For the 1982 fiscal year, beginning in October, the House and Senate both voted to trim more than $3 billion from the credit, or off-budget deficit, projected for the current fiscal year, an amount of nearly $23 billion. Perhaps more significant, Congressional budget aides noted, the total direct and indirect Federal credit requirements next year would fall to 28 percent of all the credit in the financial system, from 33.5 percent envisaged in fiscal 1981.

The size of the American household has declined sharply since 1970 because large numbers of people are living alone and there are fewer children per family, according to 1980 census figures released today. Probably the most significant aspect of the figures was that the number of households increased by 27 percent since 1970 while the number of persons living in households rose by only 12 percent. Thus, while the population was spreading out to the suburbs and beyond, individuals were also spreading out into new households in cities, suburbs and rural areas. Small Households in Manhattan From the 1970 census to April 1980, the Census Bureau announced, the average number of persons per household declined from 3.11 to 2.75 while the total number of households increased from 63.4 million to 80.4 million. Manhattan, where housing is at a premium, had an average household size of only 1.96 persons in April of last year, when the census was taken.

A tourist from Colorado was seriously wounded today when he was stabbed in the chest, apparently without provocation, in front of a gift shop in the visitors' lounge here. United Nations employees said a man wearing a white shirt and a blue suit calmly pulled out a knife with a four-inch blade in the basement lounge of the four-story General Assembly building, plunged it into the chest of the tourist, 20-year-old Charles Allen Clas, dropped the knife and slowly walked away. A suspect, identified as Joseph Brown, 23, of 226-26 Mentone Avenue in Laurelton, Queens, was arrested by United Nations security guards. They turned him over to the New York City police, who charged him with attempted murder, assault and possession of a dangerous weapon.

Michael Pertschuk riffled through some papers on his office coffee table for the two latest labels editorial writers have attached to the Federal Trade Commission. ''The cowering puppy,'' read one. ''The 92-pound weakling,'' stated the other. It was not that many years ago, the former F.T.C. chairman - currently a commissioner - recalled, that these same writers had given the agency such names as ''the Tyrannasaurus Rex of the regulatory agencies.''

In the 1960's, when New York had a critical air-pollution problem, Mayor John V. Lindsay always drew laughs from audiences around the country with the line, ''I never trust air I can't see.'' Today, New York City's air is cleaner than it used to be, but less clean than it should be. The problem, say Federal, state and city officials who monitor the air, is that no one really knows just how clean or dirty it really is. What the officials do know is that there have been significant reductions of sulfur dioxide and soot, and that the city is in compliance with Federal standards in these categories. What they do not know is to what extent automotive pollutants -carbon monoxide and ozone - are dirtying the air.