What was going on when I was born?

The Occidental Petroleum Corporation is offering $754 million in stock for the Zapata Corporation, a major oil services company, Zapata disclosed in Houston yesterday. Wall Street sources close to both companies said they had heard that Zapata told Occidental it was ''not for sale.'' Others close to the situation, however, insisted that such talk was just part of the bargaining process. Asked if the proposal was friendly, Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental, said in a telephone interview: ''Yes, absolutely. I would not be a party to an unfriendly merger with anybody.''

An article last Sunday in Connecticut Weekly incorrectly reported the date for a celebration marking the 50th anniversary of Tweed-New Haven Airport. The event will be this Sunday.

Congress, which left town exhausted after a long, hard-fought dispute over Federal spending and tax policies, will return from its summer recess tomorrow to face a cluster of difficult issues and a new confrontation with President Reagan. After a White House meeting today with his top economic advisers, Mr. Reagan authorized an Administration move to trim an additional $10 billion to $15 billion from the budget for the next fiscal year as a way of holding the deficit to $42.5 billion. To achieve the new cuts, the President is expected to propose a legislative innovation as sweeping as his budget and tax plans: an omnibus appropriation bill, which would afford a yes-or-ng vote on an entire package of cuts rather than a piecemeal approach in which legislators would be subject to constituent pressures. 'The Next Battlefront' ''The appropriations front is the next battlefront,'' said Edwin L. Dale Jr., a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget. Although economic problems are expected to dominate the fall session, the lawmakers will also turn their attention to other issues.

The Solidarity union asked today that the Government hold a national referendum on workers' rights in running factories. It also voiced support for other East European workers who might seek to set up their own independent unions. A motion, approved with only one dissenting vote at the union's national convention here, said that, if Parliament did not sponsor a referendum on self-management, then the union would do so itself. The 890 delegates also approved a message to workers in other Soviet-bloc countries who might try to establish unions free of party control.

Anna Goldin, right, mother of Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin, handing out leaflets in the Bronx extolling the virtues of her son. In Brooklyn, below, Grace Dearie, mother of John C. Dearie, told voters they should choose her son in the Democratic primary for Comptroller. About New York, page B4.

On Jan. 1 the maximum tax rate for individuals will tumble from 70 percent to 50 percent, one of the biggest rate cuts in the new tax law. This reduction in the top rate will slice hundreds of millions of dollars from the tax bills of upper-income Americans. At the same time, it could cut deeply into the traditional market for tax shelters, used by people in tax brackets greater than 50 percent. ''As a result of this substantial reduction in the top tax rate, the economic elements of a project will become more important and the tax benefits relatively less important,'' said Matthew J. Maryles and Arthur S. Ainsberg, who handle tax planning for the executives at Oppenheimer & Company, the Wall Street firm. ''To the extent that a tax shelter is a real investment, the new tax act will enhance its return,'' they said. ''But to the extent that the attraction of the shelter was its high tax savings, the act will reduce its attractiveness.''

Further budget cuts of $10 billion to $15 billion were authorized by President Reagan. The White House called the reduction a ''hardline'' effort to limit the deficit for fiscal 1982 to the $42.5 billion projected. (Page A1.) Mr. Reagan is expected to propose an innovation to achieve the cuts: an omnibus appropriation bill that would afford a single yes-or-no vote on the whole package of cuts. (A1.) The new tax law will cut deeply into the market for tax shelters, specialists say, although the program enhances certain areas, such as housing rehabilitation incentives. (D1.)

A special three-judge Federal court last night prohibited New York City from holding any primary voting tomorrow in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx for all offices, including Mayor and Comptroller. The ruling appeared to make it unlikely that any primary balloting would take place for the citywide offices in any borough tomorrow. Allen Schwartz, the city's Corporation Counsel, said the city would appeal the ruling today before Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. 'The Decision Was Erroneous' ''We're going to be appealing on the ground that the court's decision was erroneous,'' he said. Tom Goldstein, a spokesman for Mayor Koch, said, ''The Corporation Counsel speaks for the Mayor.''

Second of two articles. IN 1964, while pregnant with her fifth child and in the middle of shooting a film in Hollywood, Patricia Neal suffered in quick succession three massive hemorrhagic strokes that nearly killed her. Thanks to emergency surgery to repair the ruptured blood vessel in her brain, Miss Neal, then 38 years old, survived, only to emerge two weeks later from a coma to find herself with double vision and unable to speak or walk. ''I wanted to die,'' she recalled four years later. Instead she began the long struggle back to life and health. Aided by her husband, the author Roald Dahl, and by friends, neighbors and professional therapists, Miss Neal learned to speak, read and walk again. Six months after her strokes she gave birth to a healthy daughter and immediately resumed seemingly endless and exhausting rehabilitative exercises and speech lessons. They paid off. Three years later she was able to return to the demanding job of acting as the star of the movie ''The Subject Was Roses.'' Miss Neal's recovery after such severe strokes is an inspiration to all, but especially to the 300,000 or so Americans who each year suffer the malady and live.

The International Monetary Fund has tentatively approved an innovative $5.68 billion loan to India next month, the largest in the fund's history, officials of the agency said yesterday. Apart from its size, the loan is significant for the freedom it gives India to invest in oil production and other industries. Until recently, such loans typically have been granted in balance-ofpayments emergencies and have required currency devaluations and other restrictive measures by the borrowers. The loan is due to be announced next month, officials said.

A high proportion of the homeless men being sent to a Catskills shelter by New York City under the terms of a recent court agreement are rejecting it and returning to Manhattan. ''It's beautiful, if that's the place you want to retire to at age 19,'' said a homeless man named Merkie outside the Men's Shelter on the Bowery. Meanwhile, the city's large shelter on Wards Island, originally set up in the winter of 1979 as an emergency shelter, has become a virtually permanent residence for about a third of the 400 men who stay there on an average night, according to city officials. ''We don't know what we are - an emergency facility, a residential facility o r s omewhat of a mental-health center.' said Robert Bryant, the Volunteer s of America administrator who runs the shelter for the city. ''Due t o the emergency, we've been a little bit of everything.''

International Defiance of Poland's leadership was expressed by the Solidarity union. The 890 delegates at the union's national convention in Gdansk asked the authorities to hold a referendum on the right of workers to manage factories. The unionists also suggested that other workers of the Soviet bloc create unions free of Communist Party control. (Page A1, Column 1.) An anti-U.S. protest in West Berlin is set for Sunday during the visit by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. To the embarrassment of the Bonn Government and the dismay of many West Germans, the youth groups of the two parties in the ruling coalition vowed to proceed with the demonstration against what they see as an aggressive and reactionary American foreign policy. (A8:3-6.)