What was going on when I was born?

For six years the battle had been joined, in court and out. The Crow Indians on the reservation near here argued that a 52-mile stretch of the Bighorn River that crosses their land belonged to them, and they closed it to non-Indian fishermen. The State of Montana argued that the banks oust after 4 A.M. with about 15 cars, pickup trucks and campers parked athwart both lanes. A sign at the front of the bridge read: ''Crow Reservation Closed to Fishing Today, Tomorrow and Forever.''

A two-day printers' strike that effectively silenced most of Poland's major newspapers, ended today on an angry note. Solidarity, the independent trade union, threatened an even wider shutdown that might include television and radio. Aroused by government inquiries into the legality of the strike and by one reported threat to use force to dislodge union militants at a Warsaw printing plant yesterday, the printers said they were maintaining a nationwide strike alert and had only suspended, not halted, their action. Lech Walesa, the national union leader, had to visit strikers occupying a large printing plant here to persuade them to return to work. At a meeting at the union's Warsaw headquarters, he predicted that another confrontation over the union's demand for regular access to the official media was ''inevitable.''

The Federal Reserve Board moved to provide emergency credit for financial institutions at rates as low as 14 percent. The action, welcomed by the troubled thrift industry, is meant to offer longer-term credits than the two- to three-day loans now available. (Page D1.) American families' real income fell 5.5 percent last year, the biggest decline in the 34 years the Government has been keeping track, the Census Bureau reported. This raised those formally classified as poor to 13 percent of the population, from 11.7 percent in 1979. (A10.)

IT is getting chilly on the Hampton beaches early in the morning; it is cool in the Berkshires late at night. The summer is waning, although some of its entertainments are still intact. One of them is summer theater, which this season is rich, as always, in comedies, musicals and classics, and short, as always, in straight plays, especially somber ones. Somberness in summer theaters is sanctioned only in classics, preferably Elizabethan. The names in summer theater this year are Hart, Gershwin and Shakespeare, not O'Neill, Williams and Miller, although many of the summer productions are uncommonly ambitious. Once, the strawhat circuit was just a poor cousin of Broadway; now it is more like an adjunct. Consider, for example, Moss Hart's ''Light Up the Sky,'' which is at the John Drew Theater-Guild Hall in East Hampton, L.I. It is the quintessential summer comedy. It had a moderate success on Broadway, running for 214 performances after it opened in 1948, but somewhere or other, it finds a home every summer. ''Light Up the Sky'' is a comedy about Broadway, and the production at the John Drew features Broadway actors: Danny Aiello (in the role Sam Levene did in 1948), Gloria Grahame, Phyllis Newman, Michael Lipton, Sylvia Sidney and Russell Nype.

Reagan Administration officials said today that their decision to hold naval exercises in waters claimed by Libya was intended to affirm the right of free passage in international waters and not continue to allow even the appearance of letting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi set the rules. The possibility of an air clash, such as the one that occurred yesterday with the reported downing of two Libyan fighters, was not regarded as inevitable, nor was it considered out of the question, several officials said. But they said that because President Carter refused to allow American planes to fly over the Gulf of Sidra during similar exercises last year, there was considerable pressure from the Navy not to allow a precedent to be set. In 1973 Colonel Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, established a line across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra as a ''base line,'' south of which Libya claimed as its internal waters. The American officials said that almost yearly since then, American planes and warships had crossed that line. But last year, because of the crisis over the American hostages in Iran, and because of a desire not to cause unnecessary agitation in the region, Mr. Carter did not permit American air or naval craft to go farther south than three miles north of the line.

An 11-year-old Indian elephant named Patty filled the early-morning darkness at the Bronx Zoo yesterday with a trumpeting scream and, within seconds, gave birth to a pink-skinned, white-haired, 180-pound bull calf. The baby, which arrived 681 days after the mother and her mate, Groucho, were last observed mating, was named Astor after Mrs. Vincent Astor, one of the zoo's chief benefactors.

The oil ministers of the 13 OPEC nations, unable to resolve their price dispute, announced tonight that their heads of state were appealing directly to King Khalid of Saudi Arabia to raise that country's oil price by more than $2 a barrel. In a statement, they said they would meet again tomorrow after the appeal had been made to the Saudi ruler to agree to a pricing schedule that would end two years of wide discrepancies in the pricing of OPEC oil. It was the first time in the 21-year history of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that the heads of government had been publicly asked to resolve oil price differences. Saudi Arabia, whose $32 oil price is the lowest in OPEC, appeared to be sticking firmly to its refusal to raise the base price beyond $34. Asked whether Saudi Arabia would raise its price above $34 a barrel, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the oil minister, replied sharply, ''No, never. I told you that on the first day.'' Sheik Yamani added that Saudi Arabia would continue to charge a basic $32 if this OPEC meeting broke up in disagreement.

Most tax matters are complicated. But for those wishing to take advantage of the new rules governing tax-free retirement accounts, setting up such an account can be as easy as opening a bank account or investing in a money market fund. ''It really is very easy, and by opening a special retirement account you are getting that all-crucial tax deduction,'' Don Unterwood, manager of the retirement plans and services department at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, said in an interview. Most financial institutions may handle the tax-free retirement accounts, generally known as Individual Retirement Accounts, or I.R.A.'s. These include banks, savings and loan associations, insurance companies, brokerage firms and investment management companies. The new tax law also permits companies to handle special retirement accounts for their employees, subject to the same rules that govern I.R.A.'s. Indeed, the choices are many. And because the new tax law makes so many more people eligible to set up tax-free retirement accounts, financial institutions are scrambling to offer more and better services.

The Greyhound Corporation announced yesterday that it had named John W. Teets, a vice chairman, as chief executive officer. The promotion put the 48-year-old executive in line to succeed Gerald H. Trautman as chairman of the diversified company when Mr. Trautman retires next August. Mr. Teets was selected over two other vice chairmen, Frank L. Nageotte, who was named chief operating officer in yesterday's announcement by Mr. Trautman, and Ralph C. Batastini, who is also the company's president and chief financial officer.

a workout on the tambourine, a run-through on the waltz, some salutes and bows. Being elephants, they haven't seen the press release, and so they don't know that they are the stars of a festival, the Bronx Zoo's ''Elephant Weekend: Elephants Galore.'' Tomorrow and Sunday, the zoo will be paying a two-day tribute to the elephas maximus with storytelling by Laura Simms, dances from India (where Ganesh, the elephant god, is a favorite deity), films about elephants, a mural ''paint-in'' on 250 yards of canvas, supervised by the artist Stan Peskett, a tug-of-war between a hefty pachyderm and the Fordham University football team, and two shows a day (at noon and 2:30 P.M.) by the resident performing trio in the new elephant repertory theater. The fuss doesn't seem to concern Tus, Happy and Grumpy much. All they know is that four good performances in two days will mean lots of lovely apples. And there are other benefits, too.

The chairs at Mohawk Valley Community College here are too large for some students, the slot for the soda machine is too high, and even the most well-adjusted students have been known, occasionally, to cry for their mothers. That might seem odd on another college campus, but not here: The new students these days are as young as 3 years old. In an effort to broaden their scope and make the greatest use of their facilities, a growing number of community colleges across the country have started what some educators say could become a common phenomenon in higher education - ''college for kids.'' Community colleges broke ranks with more traditional educational institutions more than 10 years ago when they began gearing many of their offerings to ''continuing education'' for older adults. Now, in a period of declining college enrollment and increased competition for students, administrators are beginning to recognize that young children are a means of not only expanding immediate rosters but also getting a head start on recruiting students of traditional college age.

International The Navy maneuvers off Libya this week were planned to show that the United States was not honoring Libya's territorial claim to the Gulf of Sidra in the southern Mediterranean, President Reagan said. The maneuvers preceded an incident in which the United States said it had shot down two Libyan fighters that had fired on American jets. But Mr. Reagan denied that the exercises about 60 miles from the Libyan coast had been designed to provoke an incident or to threaten the Libyan regime. (Page A1, Column 6.) Oil company executives discounted the possibility that Libya would retaliate for the downing of the two jets. However, the officials expressed concern about the safety of the 1,500 American citizens living in Libya, and Exxon announced that all dependents of its employees there were being evacuated. (A11:1-2.)