What was going on when I was born?

WHEN the New Rochelle Board of Education adopted a reorganization plan closing four of its 10 elementary schools in the spring last year, the Daniel E. Webster School remained as the lone elementary school in the center of the city. Underused and racially imbalanced, the school's future did not appear bright. But when Webster reopens this fall, it will do so with a full enrollment, including a number of students returning from nonpublic schools, a waiting list, a faculty that has competed for staff positions and a racial distribution almost perfectly balanced. ''I haven't been this excited,'' Ruth Broad, a teacher at Webster said, ''in 29 years of teaching.'' After a year of curriculum planning and discussions with noted educators and scholars, Webster is beginning what its leaders view as an ''educational renaissance'' for the school. At its meeting last Monday, the New Rochelle Board of Education put the finishing touches on plans to open Webster as a ''magnet'' school. The magnet concept is what New Rochelle educational leaders describe as ''one that attracts students from all parts of the community to a particular building, voluntarily, because it offers a unique and excellent program that is different from that offered in other schools.''

What's the point of a for-sale sign that can be seen only by birds, pilots and executives flying between Danbury and Hartford? Well, Alex and Shirley Vogel have been trying to sell their llacre estate in Newtown, Conn., for two years.

For about six years, until Israel invaded southern Lebanon on June 6, the Palestinians had something closely approaching an independent state. It had an army, a police force, a crude judicial system, an educational and welfare system, a civil service and a foreign policy. Those who lived within its rough boundaries said they were too terrified then to describe it to outsiders. Now, for the first time, they are describing what it was like, telling of theft, intimidation and violence.

For quite some time now the Venice Biennale has been the sick man of the international exhibition circuit. Its illness dates primarily from the tumultuous summer of 1968, when the pan-European student unrest almost forced the Biennale to shut down. A failure of nerve led to a failure of coherent intention, and although the Biennale did not in fact die it now leads the life of a distinguished invalid. Like many another such invalid, it snoozes for much of the time. It is superstitious about thinking too far ahead. It is wide open to quack doctors. It has trouble in following any idea through, and it is noticeably shaky in its coordination. All this being so, a firsttime visitor would have a hard time believing that in the 1950's and early 60's the Venice Biennale was the most powerful thing of its kind in the world.

DICTATORSHIPS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS Rationalism and Reason in Politics. By Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. 270 pp. New York: American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster. $14.95. INTELLECTUALS in politics live dangerously. They run the risk of being neither good intellectuals nor good politicians. During the 19th century, American intellectuals were extremely rare in government; the great break in this tradition came in the 1930's with the New Deal. Now, however, politicized intellectuals go back and forth between universities or research institutes and governmental office. They are always on call; Washington is their promised land; they get there only to find that they are intellectually not what they once were. The latest star performer among intellectuals in politics is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, formerly of Georgetown University and now Ambassador to the United Nations. She is the second academic intellectual to serve in that post; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the first. Both owed their appointments to articles they wrote for Commentary magazine, which has proven to be, among other things, a highly specialized employment agency.

THE CHOSEN INSTRUMENT Pan Am. Juan Trippe. The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur. By Marylin Bender and Selig Altschul. Illustrated. 605 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $19.95. ''THE CHOSEN INSTRUMENT,'' an exceptionally well-done and interesting example of the generally dull genre of business history, is the interwoven story of Juan Trippe and Pan American World Airways, of which he was the progenitor. The book pursues its human and corporate subjects from the years immediately after World War I practically until today, when, as in the 1920's, Pan Am is an enterprise with serious financial problems, many of them the consequences of decisions taken along Juan Trippe's path to glory. Since 1979, Pan Am has lost nearly $600 million and sold off most of its nonoperating assets to raise cash. Now it hovers on the edge of insolvency. The wheel has turned full circle. In the wake of World War I, Juan Trippe, then a young stockbroker fresh from Yale, coaxed his rich college friends into financing a decidedly speculative venture. It was no more than fitting that when the Pan Am building, one of Walter Gropius's less inspired designs, was erected in Manhattan in 1963, its main entrance on Vanderbilt Avenue was right across the street from the Yale Club.

Detroit's automobile companies, like other American manufacturers, are setting up an increasing number of plants in border towns like this one where American-made materials are assembled into finished products by inexpensive Mexican labor. The goods assembled in these plants, which the Mexicans call maquilas, are then brought back to the United States under special low tariff rates. As the United States recession has deepened and some 10 million Americans, including a quarter-million auto workers, have lost their jobs, the number of employees in the maquilas grew to 128,000 by June 1981 from 91,000 in 1979, a 40 percent increase. The number of plants, meanwhile, grew from 459 to 604, according to the Commerce Department's latest figures. Calculators, clothing, suitcases, sunglasses and a host of other items requiring hand assembly flow from the plants back into the United States, with automotive components and subassemblies a growing part of the total.

THE American banking industry has been badly shaken. Two of the nation's largest, most profitable and best-respected banks - Chase Manhattan and Continental Illinois - have done what no money markets banks in recent history have done. They have lost money, plain and simple. It happened because the banks did what big, smart city banks don't usually do: They made deals worth $100 million, $200 million, even $1 billion with high-flying, obscure concerns that other major banks had turned down flat. Both Chase Manhattan and Continental invested in the energy boom with Penn Square Bank, a fast-growing Oklahoma City institution that was on the Government's ''problem bank'' list from 1980 until its sudden demise on July 5. Chase also channeled billions of dollars worth of government securities to Drysdale Government Securities Inc., a lilliputian-sized firm that collapsed with a resounding thud in May.

WHITE PLAINS ASSEMBLYMAN Peter M. Sullivan will not have to sell his condominium in White Plains and move to northern Westchester. Nicholas Spano, the Republican Assemblyman from Yonkers, will not be out of a job. And Assemblyman John M. Perone, Republican of Mamaroneck, whose district includes a portion of New Rochelle, will keep his piece of that city. If it had not been for the Justice Department's rejection of the State Legislature's original reapportionment plan, things may have been quite different for some of the county's local legislators.

RESIDENTS here remember Sept. 29, 1980, as the most bitter of all days. At 9 A.M., the Atlantic Richfield Company held simultaneous meetings in Los Angeles, Washington and Helena, the state capital of Montana, to announce the permanent closing of the 75-year-old Anaconda copper smelter. The smelter's 1,000 employees, who were at home awaiting the end of a nationwide copper strike, heard the news over the radio. The next day, nearly 25 percent of the town's work force was out of a job, and Anaconda had lost the employer who for decades had maintained its parks, built its medical centers, treated its sewage and hauled in fertile black dirt so that residents could grow grass in yards that had been ruined by the smelter's fumes. ''They cut off our primary reason for existence,'' said William N. Callaghan, an optometrist in Anaconda, whose patients are now approaching him with great embarrassment about stretching out payments for their medical bills. ''We have been biting the bullet ever since.''

Arab League emissaries last week proposed an itinerary out of west Beirut for Yasir Arafat and his 6,000 beleaguered guerrillas. But the price and conditions attached to the package ticket seemed exorbitant. Israel, signaling its impatience, launched repeated air attacks on Palestine Liberation Organization redoubts in west Beirut and on Palestinians and Syrians in the Bekaa valley. Syria, using Soviet SAM-8 missiles for the first time, downed an Israeli Phantom and captured two pilots.

JERSEY CITY AFEW minutes after he announced last Wednesday that this city's five-day water emergency had ended, Mayor Gerald McCann admitted that the same thing - a breakdown of the supply system - could happen again. ''It's an old system,'' Mr. McCann told reporters as the parched city resumed a normal routine after a period of no tap water followed by several days of having to boil it first. ''Something like this could happen at any time.'' Neglect of the century-old steel pipes that carry water from the highlands of Northern New Jersey into this municipality of 220,000 residents turned a routine break into a serious health-threatening emergency. It took some $250,000 of extra manpower and materials to get the taps flowing again here and in three other cities - Hoboken, West Caldwell and Lyndhurst -that are part of Jersey City's water system.