What was going on when I was born?

CBS Inc. and a telecommunications company based in New Rochelle, N.Y., asked the Federal Communications Commission yesterday for permission to establish multichannel over-the-air pay television services in five of the nation's biggest media markets. The systems, if approved, would be built and operated by the Contemporary Communications Corporation, a privately held company that is the nation's second-largest operator of such systems. CBS would arrange for the programming and would market the service, the companies said.

In an article yesterday on the comic opera based on Eudora Welty's ''The Ponder Heart,'' the name of the com- poser was misspelled. Her name is Alice Parker.

''I'm a longtime devotee of cooking columns and cookbooks. I've worked my way up the ladder of cooking from a simple omelet to a galantine of turkey, which I spent two days of my life executing. I've handled buffets for 60 on many occasions, but - HELP! I'm planning a wedding and reception for my daughter in mid-September. There will be approximately 100 guests. I don't know if it's the number of people or the event itself I find so overwhelming. But I can't think of one single dish to serve, aside from the usual cold salmon as a main dish.'' - Esther K. Oriol, Great Neck, L.I. THAT letter is but one of scores that I receive each year, all of them with a similar plea for help. The average reader, of course, is not a professional chef, and when faced with preparing food for a large group, the chances are that he or she does not have anything approaching the equipment or the staff of a cooking pro. Still, the task is far from impossible. With that in mind, Pierre Franey and I would like to offer a few guidelines on how to cope in the kitchen when cooking for a crowd.

The Continental Illinois Corporation took the extraordinary step today of disclosing information about many of its problem loans in an effort to reassure the public of the bank holding company's soundness. The disclosure was among steps Continental has taken in recent days to counter the impact of its $61 million second-quarter loss. The loss resulted from Continental's purchase of $1 billion in energyrelated loans from the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City, which failed on July 5. In his first press appearance since the Penn Square failure, Roger E. Anderson, Continental's chairman and chief executive officer, listed the bank's more prominent problem loans, with details of how much was owed and expectations about possible repayment.

The nation's biggest brewer, Anheuser-Busch Companies, disclosed yesterday that it was holding preliminary merger talks with Campbell Taggart Inc., the nation's second-largest bread company. The merger, if consummated, might involve as much as $650 million and would push Anheuser-Busch deeper into the food and wine business, which it has gradually been entering. But Wall Street sources, who asked not to be identified, said the likelihood of such a merger seemed remote, partly because recent rises in the price of Campbell Taggart's stock might make the company too costly to purchase. With Campbell Taggart's stock selling at about $30 a share before yesterday's announcement, Anheuser-Busch would have to offer close to $40 or more to gain the company's support for a takeover, analysts said. At that price, Campbell Taggart's nearly 16 million shares would be worth close to $650 million.

A special prosecutor has presented evidence to a grand jury that up to a dozen police officers accepted payoffs to allow illegal gambling operations to flourish in Manhattan, according to law-enforcement and criminal-justice sources. The Manhattan grand jury proceeding comes just weeks after seven precinct police officers were indicted by a Queens grand jury on charges of taking bribes from illegal bars and after-hours social clubs. Thomas A. Duffy, the special state prosecutor, refused yesterday to confirm the investigation or the grand jury proceeding. ''I have no comment on any investigation,'' he said.

An undercover agent testified yesterday that a leader of ''the Bonanno family'' had told him about killing three rivals, and then instructed the agent to kill a fourth who had escaped. The agent, Joseph D. Pistone of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, testified at a racketeering trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan. He described a 1981 conversation with Dominick (Sonny Black) Napolitano in a Brooklyn bar. ''Sonny asked me to come to the back of the lounge to talk,'' Mr. Pistone said, recalling the conversation with Mr. Napolitano, who was a captain in the Bonanno organization.

The widely accepted tenet here is that every man is as free to lose money as he is to make it. It applies to businesses large and small, but apparently not to Hong Kong's giant neighbor, China. In a deal that looks suspiciously like a bailout to some analysts, the Hong Kong Government announced recently that it would pay $379 million to a Chinese consortium called the Mightycity Company for 1,200 acres in the colony's new territories. The consortium had bought the land just two years ago for $166 million, and that was at the height of Hong Kong's land boom. Since then, property prices in the new territories, the land near the Chinese border that has been leased by Britain from China until 1997, has dropped by as much as 60 percent.

The Food and Drug Administration told a House subcommittee today that it was so swamped with paperwork that in one recent case it approved a painkiller for arthritis without knowing that it sometimes caused jaundice. This disclosure prompted the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations to ask members of the F.D.A. at a hearing whether the agency had overlooked any other, more severe side effects of the drug, including fatal liver and kidney damage, that have been reported by European physicians in recent months. Agency spokesmen defended their review of the drug. They said that the overlooked reports on jaundice had been sent to the F.D.A. by the manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Company, to update clinical studies the company had referred to in making application for approval of the drug. They said their ignorance of the side effect did not reflect poorly on the agency's overall review.

The Commonwealth Edison Company continually boasts of being the leader in nuclear power generation among the nation's publicly held utilities. In the late 1950's, it set off the first commercial nuclear chain reaction. Nearly a quarter of a century later, 45 percent of Edison's power comes from reactors, totaling more nuclear megawatts than any other investor-owned utility provides. Many energy experts are wondering, however, whether Commonwealth Edison has been blinded by its nuclear effort into pursuing a costly and risky construction program. They say the company is in a cash bind because its management is single-handedly trying to reverse the tide against nuclear power. Commonwealth Edison has six power plants under construction, including one in northern Illinois that is scheduled go into full operation on Sept. 1. By 1986 Edison plans to have spent $5.6 billion on nuclear plants in an effort to meet its goal of making nuclear capacity at least 50 percent of its total by the mid-1980's.

Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, acting before the latest Israeli assault on Beirut, blamed Israel on Tuesday for delaying the deployment of United Nations officers to monitor what had been a brief cease-fire in the Lebanese capital. The Secretary General warned that the ''situation in Beirut remains unstable and precarious.'' He said Israeli military authorities had told the commander of the United Nations observers that ''no cooperation will be extended'' to any monitors ''until a decision is taken by the Government of Israel.''

A conference committee today began deliberations on a tax bill aimed at raising $21 billion in tax revenues in the coming fiscal year and $98 billion over the next three years amid indications that both parties see a need for a strong campaign by President Reagan if the bill is to become law. ''The margin of victory will be determined by the amount of participation from the executive branch,'' said Dan Rostenkowski, Democrat of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He predicted that there would be ''no chance of passage without a full court press'' from the White House. But, he added, ''failure by the conference committee to agree would be totally destructive.''