What was going on when I was born?

Because of a schedule change, the date for the L'eggs Mini Marathon was incorrectly reported in the sports section yesterday. The race will be run May 31, beginning at 10:30 A.M. at Tavern on the Green.

Precinct 23 One Neighborhood Battles Crime A series of articles appearing periodically. By M. A. FARBER For 16-year-old Daniel Abrams, who lives on Fifth Avenue near 95th Street in the 23d Precinct, Central Park is a place to ride his bicycle, run and play baseball. It is a haven of welcome greenery at his front door. But it is also a place where he has been robbed, where he says that he has ''never seen a cop'' and where he now moves ''very cautiously.'' For an elderly woman who lives on 88th Street near First Avenue, who was leisurely watching the tugboats ply the East River the other day from a sun-drenched seat on John Finley Walk, Carl Schurz Park is ''beautiful, all in all.'' But it is a place she has avoided for two years, she said, because, all in all, she is afraid to go there.

The tall, gray-haired and bearded man stood erect as he addressed the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland seated on a throne before him in a church that was bursting with people. But his jaws trembled and his hands shook as he read the text he had composed. The deputy chairman of the regional organization of the Solidarity union had just been released from internment because of illness, and he was making his first speech since the days before martial law was declared last Dec. 13. ''In these very difficult months of this year's winter and spring, when we working people were deprived of what we had loved and wanted to serve with all our strength, we are listening with the greatest attention to the voice of the Primate of Poland,'' said the Solidarity officer, Michal Pietkiewicz, an agricultural machinery technician. Archbishop Jozef Glemp listened earnestly and the large congregation strained to hear.

In terms of speed, efficiency and results, what is happening on the table-flat, rattlesnake-infested plains north of the Orinoco River would seem to fulfill any oil wildcatter's dearest hopes. Over the past two months, for example, 20 wells have been punched into the sandy, acidic earth, and all appear immensely productive. Every 1.8 days, on average, a well expected to yield more than 300 barrels of crude oil a day for many years has been discovered. The belt is an accumulation of oil so immense that, despite problems associated with its exceptionally viscous nature, national leaders have linked the country's future directly to its development.

''I do not know if at any time in our history we have been so strongly united and so strong in spirit as we are now, although we are living through a period of pain, conflict, failure and crisis.'' - Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland. (A4:4.)

They are the unknown firms in the securities industry. Most stock and bond customers have never heard of them and many professionals in the business have never dealt with them. Even officials of the Public Securities Association, the national trade group for dealers in municipal and Government securities, cannot provide any information about them. But the companies, known variously as finders, middlemen or intermediaries, are nevertheless a vital element on Wall Street these days.

Not since 1959, when the steel industry was in the middle of a 15-month slump, have steel executives gathered in New York for their annual meeting under worse circumstances. Seven out of 10 steel companies operated in the red during the first quarter, and losses are expected to mount in the second quarter. Nearly 30 percent of the nation's 450,000 steelworkers have been laid off, and industry analysts, who just a month ago were quibbling over whether shipments for the year would slide below 80 million tons, now expect them to be under 70 million tons. And ''there is no relief in sight,'' emphasized Howard Love, chairman of the National Steel Corporation. Robert E. Boni, the head of carbon steel operations of Armco Inc., recalled a recent review of the production forecasts that had been made for one of the company's mills in the Southwest. In little more than six months, the plant's expected production had been slashed by 40 percent.

An article Saturday on a speech by Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Wein- berger in New York City incorrectly identified Leonard H. Marks. Mr. Marks is the chairman of the Foreign Policy Association.

Directors of the International Harvester Company have urged the company's management to complete ''expeditiously'' a financial restructuring plan for the manufacturer of heavy equipment and trucks. The blueprint for survival, which was formally drawn up on Saturday and includes a revision in the company's operating plan, is to be presented to Harvester's creditors on July 31. The plan had been due March 31; the company's failure to meet that deadline led to the recent top-level management shake-up, several of Harvester's lenders say.

An epidemic of measles has prompted the declaration of a limited health emergency in Dutchess County and an emergency immunization program to check the spread of the disease. The outbreak, mostly among 17- and 18-year-old students at one high school, has spread to a few infants and other children. It is believed to have begun after a 17-year-old boy contracted the disease in April on a trip to the Soviet Union with 40 students at Arlington High School, whose pupils reside in the Towns of Poughkeepsie, Unionvale, LaGrange and Beekman east of the City of Poughkeepsie.

The Federal Aviation Administration's plans to conduct a lottery Thursday of the valuable take-off and landing schedules held by Braniff Airways, which has filed for protection under the bankruptcy laws, offer short-term opportunities for many airlines but also have stirred a controversy with Braniff. Even though the F.A.A. has said that the reallocation of the schedules, called slots, is a temporary move, lasting only 60 days, Howard Putnam, the chairman of the Dallas-based airline, has said that the allocation could hamper its recovery plans. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Braniff on May 12, J. Lynn Helms, head of the F.A.A., touched off a scramble among the airlines when he provided some of the slots to carriers that agreed to pick up stranded Braniff customers and carry them to their destinations.

In less than one month as a legislative body, El Salvador's Constituent Assembly has blocked most of the country's land redistribution effort from being carried out. In its first session, the Assembly enacted legislation that effectively annulled the plan of the previous Government to make peasant cooperatives out of 1,700 of the country's large farms. And last Thursday, the rightist-dominated Assembly suspended the ''land to the tiller law,'' which permitted peasants to buy the small plots they were working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. The suspension was for one crop year, which for sugar cane, one of El Salvador's main crops, is four calendar years.