What was going on when I was born?

Baseball's All-Star Game was supposed to break records in Cleveland next Tuesday. Ticketholders had booked more than $500,000 worth of hotel rooms, and 75,000 fans were expected to spend more than $2.6 million in the city. But the stands at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland will be empty and cancellations have been flowing in to sold-out downtown restaurants with the baseball players' strike moving into its fifth week today. ''Downtown is dead without the Indians this summer,'' said Buddy Spitz, manager of the downtown Theatrical Restaurant, a haunt of visiting ballplayers that has been hurt by the strike.

San Francisco, July 10 - Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. today ordered aerial spraying with the pesticide malathion in an attempt to avoid an economically devastating Federal quarantine of California produce because of an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly. Only hours earlier, Fereral agricultural officials announced a quarantine, requiring fumigaton of all produce leaving the state to kill eggs, larvae and adults of the crop destroying insect, which infests an area south of San Francisco Bay. When Governor Brown announced that he would order aerial spraying, the Agriculture Department said it would wait and assess the situation on Monday before going ahead with the quarantine. The Governor, who had rejected such spraying Wednesday as too dangerous to the human population and ordered ground spraying and tree-stripping instead, was tight-lipped and terse today as he reversed himself. He angrily denounced the Federal action as politically motivated "sabotage" by the Reagan Administration.

Spreading urban violence erupted in more than a dozen cities and towns across England yesterday and early today as policemen and firemen fought to control thousands of black, white and Asian youths on a spree of rioting, burning and looting. A senior Government official said that the disturbances, which came as the epidemic of violence in the dilapidated inner cities entered its second week, were the most widespread to date. In some cities, he said, ''we are facing anarchy.'' By 5 A.M., most of the violence had been brought under control, but sirens and burglar alarms could still be heard through the streets of London, and palls of smoke rose from half a dozen districts. From Battersea and Brixton in the south to Stoke Newington in the north, and from Chiswick in the west to Walthamstow in the east, rocks and shattered glass littered at least 10 multiracial neighborhoods.

Israeli jets bombed Palestinian targets in southern Lebanon today in a 40-minute raid, the first such attack in five weeks. Reports from southern Lebanon said at least three people were killed and more than 15 wounded in the strike, directed at targets from the port city of Sidon to the inland town of Nabatiye, both Palestinian centers. (According to The Associated Press, some Palestinian reports said that four American-made F-15 jets were used in the attack.)

Four local youths were arrested today and accused of turning on a pipeline valve that led to the collapse of a section of an aqueduct supplying 60 percent of Newark's water. Michael Bubb, the First Assistant Prosecutor of Morris County, who announced the arrests, declined to speculate on the motives of the suspects, but he discounted suggestions that they had intended to sabotage Newark's water supply. Motive 'Difficult to Fathom' ''What goes on in the subjective minds of these young men is difficult to fathom,'' Mr. Bubb said. ''But it does not appear to have been their intent to cripple the water supply of the City of Newark.''

New York City's libraries are struggling to preserve not only their traditional peace and quiet, but also their very safety as they fend off drug addicts, vandals, thieves, derelicts and teenagers who curse and even threaten the staff. Library officials say that while some branches have relatively few problems, more and more have to cope with what the librarians call ''problem patrons.'' At the branch library in East Harlem, drug addicts frequently stumble in to ''nod out.'' Some are in such stupors that they urinate on themselves or on the floor. Others simply loll in the library chairs, silent and glassy-eyed.

Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada assured President Reagan today that participants in the forthcoming summit meeting at Ottawa would avoid ''unacceptable'' criticism of each other's economic policies. In two hours of meetings at the White House, Mr. Trudeau thus sought to set a mood of harmony and cooperation as the host of this year's annual conference of the leaders of the seven major industrial democracies, which is to be held on July 20 and 21. Despite an outward display of friendship, the two leaders also took the opportunity today to bring up briefly some thorny issues that divide Canada and the United States. Mr. Trudeau reminded Mr. Reagan that he remained concerned about acid rain from the United States coming into Canada, and Mr. Reagan said he was committed to solving the problem. (Page 30.)

Senate Republican leaders overrode the objections of President Reagan today and agreed to go to a conference with the House to resolve differences between the two chambers' versions of more than $38 billion in budget cuts. The President had urged his party's leaders in the Republicancontrolled Senate to accept the House version of the budget cuts, rather than go to a conference with the Democratic-controlled House, because he feared that the House Democrats might use disruptive and dilatory tactics to sabotage a conference and that the result might be the defeat of the entire package. The major reasons cited by Senate Republican leaders for the decision to agree to the conference were institutional pride, a preference for many provisions in the $38.5 billion Senate version and assurances from Democratic leaders, including the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., that Democrats would not be obstructive. Reagan Said to Acquiesce This morning, the President telephoned Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., the majority leader, asking him to urge the Senate to accept the House version of the bill, Mr. Baker said, but Mr. Baker and other leaders agreed later that the President was ultimately satisfied with the decision to go to conference.

Iranian firing squads executed three more leftist opponents of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fundamentalist regime today, the Teheran radio announced.

Across the river, glowering, is the city, the capital of West Germany and a capital of nebulousness, a place so politicized that even cabdrivers ask if they can go off the record to answer a question. On this side of the Rhine, a four-minute ferry ride away, sits Bonn's psychic opposite: Konigswinter. By legend, it is heathen country, the land of the Nibelungs, the sly dwarf kingdom that bedeviled Siegfried. In fact, it is a place of donkey rides and a plaster dragon, a bar calling itself the Dwarf-Trough and two-man accordian and Hammond organ dance bands that thump out ''Besame Mucho'' on Sunday afternoons for the gallants from the town's wheel factory and the women who sit waiting, fanning themselves with beer coasters. Bonn does not come to Konigswinter (the head of the local tourist office says so) and Konigswinter does not head much for Bonn, except, the town manager explains, to buy a wedding dress or rent a tuxedo. Konigswinter is a funny hat of a place, relaxed, human, open and in its own mind, spiritually incompatible with Bonn: Why else would the Chamber of Commerce omit any mention of the capital in its new brochure, ''Fabulous Konigswinter''?

President Reagan announced his nominees for Ambassadorial posts in Denmark, Finland and Guatemala today. John L. Loeb Jr., 51 years old, a New York lawyer and one-time environmental adviser to Nelson A. Rockefeller when he was Governor of New York, was selected to be Ambassador to Denmark.

The Plaza de Mayo was filled with marching soldiers on parade as the military Government celebrated Argentina's independence day yesterday with the trappings it knows best. At the airport outside the city, security was tight as former President Isabel Martinez de Peron was whisked onto an airplane last night bound for Spain. There were no cheering crowds, but after more than five years of house arrest, her freedom underlines the resurgence of the powerful blue-collar movement founded by her husband, Juan Domingo Peron, who died in office in 1974. Mrs. Peron, who succeded him as President, was widely considered inept when the military overthrew her in 1976. The country was in economic chaos and had a guerrilla war. But fortunes change rapidly in Argentina, and now it is the military that is suffering growing popular disaffection as the economy sours amid growing inflation, rising unemployment and a greatly devalued peso.