What was going on when I was born?

DELIVERIES of home heating oil in Nassau and Suffolk Counties have declined as much as 30 percent over the last two heating seasons, according to retail dealers and spokesmen for the industry. One result is that supplies of home heating oil are high as the 1982 heating season gets under way. Richard Rocchio, the executive vice president of the Long Island Oil Heat Institute, said the decline in deliveries reflected determined efforts of customers to conserve oil by upgrading their equipment, insulating and heating with auxiliary systems, such as kerosene heaters and wood and coal stoves. Mr. Rocchio said home conservation accelerated sharply after the retail price of home heating oil topped $1 two seasons ago. The average retail cost per gallon this season hovers near $1.30 in the two counties. Mr. Rocchio and a number of retail dealers said that supplies this winter were more than ample to meet demand, and most dealers do not expect prices to rise during the first part of 1982.

THE steep recession, which battered the American economy in the final months of the old year, poses the greatest problem for business in the new. And the recession also poses the greatest domestic challenge to President Reagan who, having led the nation into this slump, to his Administration's proclaimed surprise, now hopes to lead it out without reviving inflation or sending interest rates skyward again. For many businesses, the issue is not how to cope but how to survive. Fina ncial disarray and weak and declining demand have imposed a liq uidity squeeze on housing, the thrift industry, the autoindustry, rub ber, chemicals and many other old-line industries. Many companies caught in the liquidity squeeze are trying to escape it by cutting capital spending for new plant and equipment to conserve cash, cutting inventories to avoid heavy interest charges and laying off employees, both blue-collar and white-collar.

THE golden girl of Greenwich has married, and, but for the sighs of would-be suitors, local joy was just short of absolute. Residents in the hometown of the Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill only wish she had chosen Greenwich rather than Beverly Hills, Calif., as the setting for her wedding two days ago to Dean Paul Martin, a union some here likened to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. ''Absolutely,'' Etalo Ceci, owner of the Exclusive Bridal Shoppe in Greenwich and a one-time designer for Miss Hamill, said before the wedding. ''She's due it as an Olympic champion. We don't come by those everyday. But I'm disappointed that after naming the skating rink for her, the wedding won't be here.''

O F the four quarterbacks in today's conference championship games that will determine the Super Bowl XVI matchup, three have been developed by Bill Walsh, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers -his own Joe Montana as well as Ken Anderson of the Cincinnati Bengals and Dan Fouts of the San Diego Chargers. It's not a coincidence. Nobody in the recent history of the National Football League has nurtured quarterbacks as successfully as Bill Walsh has. ''You can't make something out of nothing, I've had failures,'' the 49er coach was saying now. ''But if a quarterback has basic intelligence and basic ability, you can develop him.''

North Carolina's Tar Heels did not beat Ralph Sampson this afternoon. They outnumbered him. Sampson, Virginia's 7-foot-4-inch junior center, scored from inside and out, above the basket and below, with his injured right hand and his left. He played one of the greatest games of his career, scoring 30 points and getting 19 rebounds. That was not enough. In the final minute, after the Tar Heels had rallied from 9 points behind to take the lead, and the Cavaliers badly needed to get the ball inside, Carolina would not let them. The Tar Heels won, 65-60, and for the second time in 15 days they had protected their top ranking in both wire-service polls by defeating an unbeaten second-ranked team.

I T was an ironic, revealing and, as Charles L. Brown, chairman of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, put it, a ''historic'' decision. The Republican Administration of Ronald Reagan, standard-bearer of the credo that bigness does not equal badness, is ordering the breakup of the largest private corporation on earth, worth some $137 billion. After struggling in the courts for seven years, America's communications trust, embodied by A.T.&T., has met the same fate as Standard Oil and the great tobacco trusts of the turn of the century. ''In terms of dollars, it is the biggest corporate breakup in history,'' ventured Donald L. Flexner, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division under President Carter.

An investigation into race-fixing at the Meadowlands harness track in New Jersey has centered on a Delaware gambler, a New York lawyer and one of the nation's leading harness drivers, according to Federal law enforcement and harness-racing security officials. The officials said that Wayne (Babe) Donaway, a 44-year-old gambler who has been barred from many race tracks; Anthony Genovese, a lawyer and horse owner, and Bernard (Ben) Webster, one of the top trainers and drivers, were the chief targets of their investigation. A Federal Grand Jury in Newark has been taking testimony for several months and indictments are expected within three weeks. In an apparently unrelated case that was revealed last Wednesday, indictments are expected also in a thoroughbred racing scandal involving jockeys and trainers at the East Rutherford track.

Margaret Tuft caresses New York City with her eyes. No cornice, no lintel, no doorway escapes her gaze as she contemplates the architectural integrity of her domain. Every day for 13 years, Mrs. Tuft has pounded the pavement as a preservationist for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, an agency of microscopic size and a meager million-dollar budget whose job is to insure that creeping modernism does not overtake every corner of the city. But no longer. Mrs. Tuft, who brought to her work experience as a librarian and a stevedore as well as a degree in preservation from Columbia University, retired on Dec. 31. She spent her last day at the Landmarks Commission touring some of her favorite buildings, and in several weeks she will be off to Portland, Ore., she said, ''to do something new.''

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company agreed to dismantle its communications empire to settle an antitrust suit in part because it disliked the direction of legislation pending in Congress, the company's chairman and chief executive, Charles L. Brown, said yesterday. Mr. Brown also said that ending the Federal Government's sevenyear-old antitrust suit would lift a cloud of uncertainty from the company and eliminate the provisions of a 1956 legal agreement that prevented Bell from entering new businesses. The settlem ent, announced Friday, calls for A.T.&T. to divest itself of its 22 operating companies, which provide local telephone service, in e xchange for allowing Bell to enter new businesses, such as data proce ssing. Reflecting on the thought of splitting the Bell System, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the nation's phone service, Mr. Brown said: ''This is a major emotional thing for all of us here. We have operated for 100 years on the basis of one Bell system. It just had to be changed, that's all.''

AMAGANSETT WITH the presentation last November before the East Hampton Town Planning Board of a development proposal for the third and largest section of the former Bell estate in Amagansett, the long search for an alternative to subdivision for one of eastern Long Island's few remaining grand old estates has apparently ended. Once a 555-acre parcel, the estate amassed by Dr. Dennistoun M. Bell is considered spectacular even in an area where it was once not uncommon for the privileged seeking privacy to create virtual fiefdoms along the coast, buying up acreage, planting elaborate grounds, employing armies of servants, even maintaining independent supplies of food, water and power. With its 1916 manor house, four guest cottages, numerous outbuildings, rolling wooded terrain and 80-foot bluffs overlooking Gardiners Bay, the estate has long been considered by some local residents an ideal site for a college or similar public facility. Until recently, George Sid Miller Jr., former chairman and now vice chairman of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, shared that hope.

WITH last week's historic developments in suits against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the International Business Machines Corporation, the attention of antitrust-policy watchers snapped back toward the Justice Department and its antitrust enforcer, William F. Baxter. Until the Friday announcements, however, it had been the Federal Trade Commission and its new chairman, William C. Miller 3d, in the spotlight with the Mobil and U.S. Steel bids for Marathon Oil. Indeed, in unexpectedly lively matches, the Reagan Administration is bouncing balls fiercely in both of the antitrust courts available to it. It is in the F.T.C. court that, almost since Mr. Miller took command in October that one of the biggest and most fiercely contested takeover attempts on record has been waged, the $6 billionplus bids by Mobil and U.S. Steel for Marathon. Big Steel nailed down its victory last week after the Supreme Court refused to hear Mobil's last desperate appeal.

Proponents called it ''creation science,'' but in a sharply worded 38-page opinion, Federal District Court Judge William Ray Overton called it hogwash. Ruling last week in Little Rock, Judge Overton held that creationism is religious in its import and that the Arkansas law requiring its teaching in public schools violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The opinion, in the case of McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, was unequivocal on the key points. Judge Overton concluded that creationism, whose tenets include the relatively recent creation of all things by a supernatural force, ''has no scientific merit or educational value.'' He disagreed with the defendants' argument tha t a belief in s udden creation is not necessarily religious and he criticized th e state's ''Balanced Treatment Act'' for distorting the theory of evo lution as ''a hodge-podge of limited assertions, many ofwhich are fac tually inaccurate.'' The ideas of the act referred literally to the Book of Genesis, he said, adding the clinching FirstAmendment arg ument: ''The evidence is overwhelming that both the purpose and e ffect of Act 590 is the advancement of religion in the public school s.'' The state Attorney General said he would probably appeal.