What was going on when I was born?

Working through the night, House and Senate conferees reached agreement this morning on unsettled issues in the multibillion-dollar tax bills that both houses of Congress passed this week. The conclusion of the all-night conference at 8:30 A.M. appeared to set the stage for final passage of a tax bill and its signing by President Reagan within days. However, at a brief Senate session this evening, the majority leader, Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, announced that he was deferring consideration of the conference bill until Monday at the request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. The House is to return on Tuesday to consider the bill. Mr. Baker said Senator Kennedy had notified him today that he would offer a motion to send the bill back to conference. In a strongly worded statement released by his office, Senator Kennedy asserted that the conference bill gave oil producers excessive and unjustified relief from the so-called windfall profits tax.

straightforward, efficient and built to survive. He is also a man who has said more than once that free enterprise should be used to defend free enterprise. In other words, if a jet fighter is reliable, efficient and meets the needs of the market, it will sell. It doesn't need a handout from Uncle Sam. To prove it, Mr. Jones is spending $300 million of Northrop's money on a new plane, the F-5G Tigershark, the latest of the company's supersonic fighters in the immensely successful F-5 family. (The 3,500th family member was delivered last week, to Thailand.) And he is challenging a longtime industry pattern that normally calls for getting advance orders and government money to assist in the enormously expensive process of designing, building and testing new planes. Mr. Jones has no advance orders. In fact, he didn't even build a prototype. ''We didn't need it. We designed it right the first time,'' the 61-year-old executive said. ''When you're using your own money, you usually do what's right.''

HADDON HEIGHTS TAPED to a brick wall at the entrance to Representative James J. Florio's campaign headquarters was a hand-printed sign soliciting participation in ''The 10-Day Club.'' It offered free, exclusive membership to anyone ''willing to traverse the unknown, explore the unmentionable, experience the unquestionable and devote 10 exciting days to the realization of our goal of electing Jim Florio on June 2, 1981.'' To qualify, the message continued, applicants had to be either ''unemployed, laid off, willing to take a leave of absence or quit.'' Among the dozens of signatures below, someone with a red marking pen and a sense of humor inked in the name of Mr. Florio and the designation, ''Unemployed.''

-------------------------------------------------------------------- RALPH BLUMENTHAL is a reporter for The New York Times. By RALPH BLUMENTHAL ''Halte!'' From a drawbridge guarding access to the walled fortress of Louisbourg, France's largest military outpost in the New World, two musket-bearing sentries in tunics, breeches and tricornered hats stepped forward to block our path. Luckily my wife and I had remembered our conges, or fishermen's passports, and we held them out for the scrutiny of the soldiers. They lowered their rifles and waved us and our baby on into the world of 1744. The little admission charade rarely fails to tickle visitors to the vast Louisbourg restoration, one of the newer attractions of Cape Breton Island off the eastern end of Nova Scotia, Canada. On a fourday auto trip we also sampled many of the others - rugged highlands with steep bluffs plunging to the sea, quiet fishing villages and old coal mining towns, places with evocative Scottish names like Inverness and Skir Dhu, Strathlorne, Dunvegan and Dundee. We found a museum full of the lesser-known inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and spent one night at a guesthouse that Bell and Thomas Edison patronized and another at a lodge considered one of the finest in Canada.

YONKERS STILL without a budget, Yonkers is exploring ways to cut expenses and increase revenue while awaiting an Albany decision on state aid. The strategy includes municipal layoffs, the level of which would depend on how much, or how little, money finally arrives. City Manager Eugene J. Fox outlined his plans last week to a meeting of City Council members who will eventually have to vote on a budget and send it to the State Comptroller, Edward V. Regan, for certification. The state's fourth-largest city has been without a budget since the fiscal year began last July 1.

EGYPT's dethroned King Farouk once remarked wryly on the prospect that only five monarchs would be left in the world - the Kings of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs, and of England. Farouk was a bit off on the numbers (and the gender) but right about the enduring affection of the British people for their tencentury-old monarchy. It came pouring forth last week for Queen Elizabeth II, her heir Prince Charles, and especially the radiant young English noblewoman he wed, the Lady Diana Spencer.

SHARON THIRTY years ago, Bill Wilbur, a poultry farmer, shot a ring-necked cock pheasant a few hundred yards from his home with a 12-gauge shotgun. When he reached the bird, he found only the tip of one wing had been broken. He gingerly carried the bird to his farm and placed it in one of his chicken coops. A neighboring farmer, hearing about the lone bird, presented Mr. Wilbur with four more pheasants - all hens - to keep the convalescing bird company. Thus began what has become a sizable new industry in this small, northwestern Connecticut town. Today, the 13-acre Wilbur farm has about 12,000 incubator-hatched pheasants. Almost all are only a few months old. Their numbers will remain unchanged until mid-September, when, fully grown, they will be sold to game clubs for sport or to chefs for cooking. By Christmas, only about 5 percent will be left for breeding.

Congress and the American people have learned through experience that it can take years before the full effects of new Government programs make themselves known. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that broad social consequences - intended and unintended - flow from changes in the tax system. Indeed, it may turn out that President Reagan's huge tax cuts, due to get final Congressional approval this week, will alter personal and institutional patterns of behavior more dramatically than his budget cuts. ''The taxing power of Government must be used to provide revenues for legitimate Government purposes,'' Mr. Reagan declared shortly after his inauguration. ''It must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change.'' But surely the newly approved tax legislation goes a long way toward doing both. Achieving economic growth by modifying the behavior of Americans lies at the heart of its rationale.

The foreign ministers of 22 industrialized and developing nations met in closed session today to prepare for a conference here in October on the problems of world poverty. The fall meeting, which President Reagan plans to attend along with the heads of state or government of 21 other nations, aspires to break the protracted deadlock between rich and poor countries in what has become known as the North-South dialogue. ''The time has come at last to launch a great crusade to defeat fear and death, hunger and injustice,'' Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda of Mexico said at today's opening session. Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. said this afternoon that the conference had ''got off to an extremely auspicious and promising start,'' with concensus among the ministers on several key points. He added that ''the spirit of Cancun can be captured in a phrase that I coined: shared responsibility for mutual benefit.''

ETHNIC AMERICA A History. By Thomas Sowell. 353 pp. New York: Basic Books. $16.95. By DAVID HERBERT DONALD FOR more than a generation, liberals have maintained that minority groups are at a disadvantage in America. Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society were all committed to lessening the discrimination and deprivation suffered by ethnic minorities. Despite programs promoting equal opportunity, desegregation and affirmative action, liberals have not been sure that the battle was being won. In 1968, the Kerner commission on the causes of civil disorder solemnly warned of the serious danger that the United States was becoming a permanently divided society. --------------------------------------------------------------------- David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Charles Sumner, is a member of the executive committee of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard.

THE Supervisors of Huntington and Babylon are expressing confidence in officials of the Multi-Town Solid Waste Management Authority who have been under fire and who could be removed under new state legislation. The new legislation, which was signed by Governor Carey, also sets a deadline of March 1, 1983, for the start of the often delayed and controversial project. The garbage problem on the Island has reached crisis proportions, local officials say, with such communities as Huntington and Bethpage running out of landfills, and existing landfills threatening to pollute the underground water suppply, such as in Hauppauge. ''There is a garbage disposal crisis on Long Island, and the 13 towns will have to get out of the garbage-burying business,'' Donald J. Middleton, the regional director of the State Environmental Conservation Department, said recently.

''WE now have more openings for school bus drivers than at any time in our history,'' said John Silvanie, general manager of Vanguard Tours, in announcing the opening of the company's drive to recruit school bus drivers. Vanguard, said to be the county's largest school-transportation supplier, has begun its drive to hire and train drivers to start work when the school year begins next month.