What was going on when I was born?

Wholesale prices for a growing number of products - including aluminum, sugar, gasoline and steel - continued to decline in March, an indication of further weakening in the economy, according to a survey of the nation's purchasing managers. ''There is a definite decline in prices,'' said Jack Haltmen, manager of material purchases for the Mueller Brass Company, a subsidiary of the Sharon Steel Company. ''Even any premiums we were paying a couple of months ago for delivery and other services have dropped dramatically. We find that we can get lower prices for almost everything but a few chemical items.''

The antitrust agreement between the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Justice Department has provoked a deep sense of unease across the country. In recent testimony and comments, members of Congress, members of the Federal Communications Commission, state utility regulators, state attorneys general, competitors of A.T.& T., large-scale users of telephone services and legal authorities all voiced dissatisfaction with the proposed settlement, though there is no consensus among them as to what should be done. And a poll commissioned by A.T.& T has found that consumers are concerned that the resulting breakup of the company and the passage of bills in Congress to change the settlement could hurt phone service and bring about increased rates. Two Related Questions The concern over the accord expressed in testimony before Congressional committees and the F.C.C. as well as in comments submitted to the Justice Department and the United States District Court here come down to two related questions. Will the local phone companies, divested by A.T.& T. and left to make it for the most part on local service alone, become weaker businesses as a result? And if so, what is to prevent the hardpressed local companies, just to stay in business, from raising their rates beyond the means of many of their customers?

Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands has brought a sense of humiliation and frustration to many Britons for whom the incident has served as a reminder of the decline of Britain as a world power. A widespread sense of anger has emerged over the Government's handling of a crisis with a country described in Parliament and in the streets as a ''tin-pot dictatorship.'' ''The Argentinians have shown us up and our Government has shown us up as well,'' said Patrick Bowe, a middle-aged electrician, as he sipped beer in a pub today. ''If we had had our forces over there, they wouldn't have bothered us.''

International Three Argentine marines were killed in a battle Saturday with a small contingent of British marines at Port Grytviken in the South Georgia Islands, which are in the Falkland group, the Argentine Government announced. Diplomats said that 12 to 20 British marines fought an unknown number of Argentines in the brief fighting. None of the British were killed, the official Argentine report said. (Page A1, Column 6.) Britons are angry and humiliated over Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands, creating a a major political crisis for the threeyear old Government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Conservative and opposition spokesmen have been unrelenting in their criticism of the Government's failure to anticipate the takeover and in their calls for the resignation of Defense Minister John Nott and, not so severely, of Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary. (A1:4-5.)

THE scene could be any National Hockey League hotel room from Boston to Edmonton. Bryan Trottier and Mike Bossy are fighting again. It probably sounds like this: ''You did it again.'' ''What?'' ''Left the top off the toothpaste.'' In five seasons of sharing toothpaste on the road - Bossy said Trottier carries the tube -the ''fights'' have been far less frequent than the goals for one of the best combinations in sports history. ''Yeah, we have disagreements some time, husband-and-wife type things, like turning the TV off or the sound down or the lights off,'' said Bossy. ''I wouldn't fight him anyway. He's too strong.'' In the almost magical way that peanut butter gets along with jelly, these two almost painfully shy men from different parts of Canada have blended great individual talents into the best goal-producing combination outside of Wayne Gretzky and his grandfather. It is called ''chemistry'' and Al Arbour, the Islander coach and master chemist who first put the two men on the same line during the exhibition games of Bossy's rookie season, had no more idea he was stumbling onto the secret formula than did the inventor of the hamand-cheese sandwich. It took about 15 games, Arbour said, for him to ''know there was something special.''

Administration officials said today that they expected the United States to try to use its influence to produce a diplomatic formula in the next week or so that could avert a military clash between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. One senior official said that while the possibility existed that the Administration might decide to stay aloof from the dispute, this was by far the least likely of the alternatives, which included a direct mediation effort by the United States, further action by the United Nations and involving the Organization of American States. At the request of Argentina, the issue of the seizure of the islands will be raised at the Organization of American States in Washington on Monday. Foreign Minister Nicandor Costa Mendez of Argentina, who failed in the United Nations Security Council on Saturday to block a vote demanding the immediate withdrawal of Argentine forces from the islands, will present his nation's case to the hemispheric group.

San Salvador's acting Archbishop, Arturo Rivera Damas, said today in his Palm Sunday homily that last Sunday's election was an expression ''of the people's profound aspiration that the violence stop.'' The Archbishop, speaking to several hundred parishoners carrying palm fronds mixed with purple bougainvillea and other softly scented flowers, called on the leftist guerrillas to ''leave the route of guns and destruction'' and urged their opponents on the right to continue the reforms of the last two years. He also obliquely criticized the rightist parties in the election for trying to form a majority coalition that would exclude the Christian Democrats, the party that received the largest number of votes.

The Mets ended spring training today with a 7-4 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, who pounded Craig Swan for all their runs in the first three innings. Afterward, the Mets headed for New York, where they will work out Monday in Shea Stadium before going to Philadelphia to open the season Tuesday, with Pat Zachry pitching against Steve Carlton. They left here with a record of 10 victories and 14 defeats in the exhibition games and with the conviction that the fate of the club rested in the hands of a suspect pitching staff. ''Pitching is my only concern,'' said George Bamberger, the onetime pitching coach of the Baltimore Orioles, who replaced Joe Torre as manager last October. ''They didn't do too bad. It's not as though we had a guy who won 18 games last year, and he had a bad spring. Nobody on the Mets won more than seven games last year, so nobody could fall too far.''

The Nets, who are on the verge of attaining their first playoff berth in three seasons, completed a 6-0 season sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the worst team in the league, with a 119-109 victory today. The triumph, the Nets' fourth straight, raised their record to 39-36. More importantly, it put them one and a half games ahead of Washington and Atlanta, both of which have 37-37 records and are holding the fifth and sixth positions in the overall Eastern Conference standing. The two division champions and the four teams with the next best records in the Eastern Conference will qualify for the playoffs. The seventh-place team, Detroit (35-40), is four games behind the Nets. Any combination of four Net victories and Piston losses will clinch a berth for New Jersey.

Almost every day since the Stouffer's Inn arson and murder trial began three months ago, Blanca Marin has been in Westchester County Court, sitting in a front row, watching her husband, Luis. Mr. Marin, a 26-year-old Guatemalan who was a former coffee waiter at the hotel, has been held without bail since his arrest a year ago on charges that he poured gasoline or some other accelerant on a hotel rug and then ignited the fire that led to 26 deaths. Last week, Judge Lawrence N. Martin Jr. said in County Court that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, which he characterized as based on ''speculation.'' But rather than dismiss the charges - a decision that could not be appealed - the judge said he would leave it to the jury. And so starting Monday at 9 A.M., J. Radley Herold, one of Mr. Marin's lawyers, will argue in summation that the evidence fell short of conviction, while Geoffrey K. Orlando, an assistant district attorney, will say that all other possibilities have been eliminated in what the prosecution has acknowledged is a case based on circumstantial evidence.

Prices of many industrial products continued to fall in March, an indication of further weakening in the economy, according to a survey of purchasing managers. Thirty-three percent of those responding reported lower prices, the most in three decades. (Page D1.)

It's called Souk al-Manakh, but it has very little in common with the old Arab markets, the souks of Cairo and Damascus, where jewelers and antique dealers are wedged in between spice and cloth merchants in men sit pensively in cafes looking out into space. Here everything is frantic and feverish and new. The building, barely completed, is an ultramodern structure with air-conditioning, escalators and ramps leading to the parking areas on each of the five floors. What is traded here is money - large quantities of money.