What was going on when I was born?

As far back as anyone can remember, the elderly people have come out of their small apartments and their old houses to sit on park benches throughout the city in the heat of summer, and they still do. It may well be the ultimate urban scene. They sit along many of the roadways, such as Shore Parkway in Brooklyn and near the White Plains Road subway station on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. They sit on benches in the parks, near the Grecian Shelter in Prospect Park or along the pleasant pathways in Astoria Park, where the Triborough Bridge looms like a stage prop. They sit on the islands of Upper Broadway, among the red geraniums recently planted there. But the scene has been altered by something new and decidedly suburban: the aluminum and plastic lawn chair.

The Senate unanimously confirmed George P. Shultz today as the next Secretary of State, replacing Alexander M. Haig Jr. The 97-to-0 vote, with three Senators absent, occurred 24 hours after Mr. Shultz was unanimously approved by the Foreign Relations Committee. He is expected to be sworn in Friday at a White House ceremony attended by President Reagan. The committee had hoped to have Mr. Shultz confirmed by the full Senate on Wednesday night by getting the unanimous consent of the entire Senate to waive the usual minimum one-day delay. But Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, refused to go along, saying he wanted time to study the transcript of the hearing. Mr. Proxmire voted today for confirmation.

THE quintessential summer theater may be the Goodspeed Opera House. It is an 1876 building, lovingly restored; it is the home of musical revivals, lavishly produced. Its attraction now is ''High Button Shoes,'' the 1947 Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn-Stephen Longstreet musical, notable for its score, its dancing and its general jollity. In the second act, while the Keystone Kops chase a con man, a gorilla materializes, balletically, from a bathhouse. The Goodspeed audience stamps its tasseled loafers in approval. Outside, the sun is shining on the Connecticut River. It is what summer theater is all about. Summer attractions, however, are not necessarily confined to the musical, the larky or the effervescent. There are also the dramatic, the earnest and the moving. Elsewhere in Connecticut, for example, there is Shakespeare (somewhere or other in summer, there is always Shakespeare); there are also William Saroyan, Friedrich Durenmatt, Oscar Wilde and Simon Gray. Simon Gray's ''Molly'' is at the Long Wharf in New Haven. Strictly speaking, the Long Wharf is not a summer theater, although in summer it does attract summer vacationers, which makes it a kind of honorary summer theater. ''Molly'' stars Tammy Grimes, repeating a role she did at the Hudson Guild in New York in 1978. There was talk then about bringing ''Molly'' to Broadway; there is talk now about bringing it to Broadway. Consider this then as a summer tryout. Durrenmatt's ''Episode on an Autumn Evening'' and Saroyan's

CBS News said yesterday that it had violated some of its own rules of journalistic practice in a documentary last winter about Vietnam. Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News, said the violations had not undermined the central thesis of the program and ''CBS News stands by this broadcast.'' But he said the organization was creating a new position, vice president for news practices, ''to insure that our organization is fully conversant with CBS News standards and their importance to the credibility of journalism.'' He added that CBS was ''planning a future broadcast on the issues treated in the original broadcast.'' In a telephone interview, he said, ''We don't view this as a corrective broadcast'' but as a normal next step to follow up on the public interest in the Vietnam issues elicited by the initial program. Mr. Sauter's eight-page memorandum to his staff followed a six-week internal investigation of the program, ''The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,'' which was shown Jan. 23. The program charged that Gen. William C. Westmoreland and his officers had conspired to manipulate figures on enemy troop strength to mollify criticism of the war effort in Vietnam.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt called today for a meeting of Arab leaders ''to agree on a unified policy for solving'' the Palestinian problem. He also urged Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to recognize each other's existence and called on the United States to ''open a dialogue with the Palestinians.'' Mr. Mubarak, who spoke at a news conference after meeting with the visiting West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, said today that he would go anywhere in search of Arab unity. Previously he had said he would not attend any conference in an Arab capital that did not have diplomatic relations with Egypt.

''I was about to turn around and deck the guy but some people intervened.'' - Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, after being assaulted. (A10:5.)

Gov. William A. O'Neill, taking full advantage of incumbency in his race for the Democratic nomination, went to the Connecticut National Guard's summer encampment earlier this month and had his picture taken as he watched the firing of an artillery piece. Mr. O'Neill held his fingers to his ears against the noise. The next day, Ernest N. Abate, the Governor's challenger, displayed the newspaper photo at a news conference. ''Look at this,'' he said. ''He's not listening.'' Mr. Abate, Connecticut's Speaker of the House, has charged repeatedly that the O'Neill administration has kept out of reach of the General Assembly $28 million in Federal funds that should have been available for appropriation. Mr. O'Neill has not adequately responded to the allegations, Mr. Abate says.

Facet Enterprises is just a modest-sized auto parts manufacturer based in Tulsa, Okla., but the lawsuit it has brought against the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has dozens of larger companies running scared. All Facet wants is a judicial ruling that it terminated its pension plan on Nov. 13, 1980, and, in the process, qualified for assistance from the pension agency. But many of the nation's largest corporations - as well as the pension corporation - believe that such a ruling could upset the entire private pension insurance system. They say that Facet is trying to take advantage of a loophole in the Federal pension law, and unless that loophole is closed, they could wind up footing the bill for some $4.3 billion worth of pension benefits owed by other corporations. 'An Outrageous Loophole' ''The Facet situation is a perfect illustration of the potential for abuse in the pension law as it's now written,'' said George Pantos, counsel to a group of 112 major corporations that want to see the Federal pension law amended. ''The wording of the law permits companies with unfunded pension liabilities to terminate their plans and have the Government step in and pay the benefits, passing the costs along to other corporations,'' he said. ''It's an outrageous loophole that should be closed.''

Depositors of the Abilene National Bank have withdrawn more than 10 percent of the bank's $428 million in total deposits since last Friday following a newspaper report that the bank had suffered heavy losses on loans to oil-and-gas ventures. The bank, which denounced the article in The Dallas Morning News as Federal bank regulators were criticized in the Penn Square Bank collapse, and a Seattle bank announced layoffs because of Penn Square-related losses. Page D3. ''grossly inaccurate,'' said that withdrawals had returned to ''normal levels'' today, but that it had suffered a net outflow of $50 million since last Friday.

A New York City man, described by the F.B.I. as the communications officer for militant radicals accused or suspected in the Brink's armored-car robbery last year in Rockland County, has been cooperating with law-enforcement authorities since April. The man, the F.B.I. said, has agreed to help decipher coded telephone conversations it obtained by wiretapping the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America in Harlem and a number of radical hiding places or ''safe houses.'' The association was described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radical headquarters. This was disclosed yesterday by Kenneth P. Walton, deputy assistant director of the F.B.I. Described as a 'Linchpin' The man, identified as Peter Middleton, a 34-year-old acupuncturist, was said by Mr. Walton to be a ''linchpin'' in the continuing investigation into a suspected conspiracy among various radical organizations to rob banks and armored cars dating back to 1976.

For steel executives there was no place to work like Bethlehem. Salaries provided for large homes on sprawling acres, raises came regularly and there were plenty of assistants to take care of things if a manager spent an afternoon of golf at the company-subsidized Saucon Valley Country Club. For business visitors, there was the choice of big rooms at the company-owned Bethlehem Hotel or guest quarters and golf at the company-owned Weyhill Golf Course. And for this city, there was nothing like having Bethlehem Steel for a benevolent big brother, aiding its institutions, spearheading fund drives, helping finance civic improvements and paying for a new town hall.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed today to drop its 12-year-old prohibition against television network ownership of cable television systems, saying cable has come of age and no longer needs such protection. In a separate action, the commission decided to drop all restrictions on the number of cable systems an individual or company may own. The F.C.C. said that dropping the restriction is unlikely to increase ownership concentration in any one area.