What was going on when I was born?

WHEN the telephone rang one recent afternoon at Bobby Murcer's home, Kay Murcer chatted amiably with one of her husband's former teammates. Their 12-year-old son listened on an upstairs extension. After Mrs. Murcer hung up, Todd barrelled down the stairs and asked incredulously: ''Was that really Roger Maris?'' Mrs. Murcer was taken aback. Her husband and Maris last played together for the Yankees in 1966, four years before Todd was born. ''He keeps forgetting that Bobby knows those guys,'' Mrs. Murcer said, ''because it's hard to believe he played with them and he's still playing. I guess it jarred all our memories.'' The Murcers' memories are rich and deep, stretching through an 18-year career, including 14 1/2 years in the Yankee organization. He began in the Yankee farm system in 1964, the year the dynasty that was Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the rest played in its last World Series. Bobby Murcer was a wide-eyed 18-year-old then, courting his childhood sweetheart from Oklahoma and polishing his skills in the Appalachian League.

VINCE DiBARTOLO held up a big, yellow tomato at Shop Wise, his fruit and produce market on Palisade Avenue in Englewood. ''This is supposed to be a Jersey Beefsteak - red and full of juice and flavor,'' he said with restrained disgust. ''It was picked four days ago in South Jersey, and is now here, trying to ripen into one of the beauties we used to get at this time.'' A few days earlier, an employee in the DiBartolo market cut a ripe Jersey tomato in half to show what he meant when he said that some tomatoes were giving a dismal performance this year - as of last week, at any rate.

Federal Judge Harold H. Greene stepped into unexplored legal territory last week when he asked for major changes in a settlement of the Justice Department's antitrust suit against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. While many thought his judicial activism in the complex case established a praiseworthy landmark, others thought he might have lost his way. His ruling left intact the basic quid pro quo the litigants agreed to in January: A.T.&T. would divest itself of its 22 Bell System operating companies, worth around $80 billion, in return for being allowed to enter data processing and other rapidly growing segments of the telecommunications business from which it has been barred. But Judge Greene added 10 modifications aimed largely at insuring the financial stability of the 22 operating companies when they become independent and keeping rates from soaring.

THERE are a variety of grants, tax credits and laws governing rents i n New York, New Jersey and Connecticut designed specifically to easet he burden of housing costs for low-income, elderly people. In New York City and some parts of Nassau, Rockland and Westchester Counties, there are provisions of the rent-control and rentstablization laws that exempt the elderly from most rent increases. There are also tax credits available to low-income elderly renters in New York and New Jersey; there is a similar tax program in Connecticut, but the elderly tenant receives a direct cash payment from the state. In New York State, a program to help poor tenants pay for heating costs will, in some cases, give bonuses to elderly renters.

VALHALLA INSIDE the large gatehouse of the Kensico Reservoir here, water racing through the giant sluice gates deep beneath the floor on its way to New York City sounds like endlessly-passing city subway trains. It is a sound that has been heard since 1915, when the brick and concrete gatehouse and the rest of the Kensico Reservoir was built. But beginning probably in October, another sound will join in: the hum of turbine generators. For the first time, the water racing through the subterranean chambers of the building will be harnessed to make electricity. The hydroelectric plant is one of two being built by the New York State Power Authority at New York City-owned reservoirs as part of a 1978 agreement with the city. The electricity the plants will produce - 7,750 kilowatts - is considered ''a drop in the bucket'' compared to the city's overall needs but will help reduce its dependence on imported oil by about 75,000 barrels a year. The number of kilowatts is equal to that used by 3,875 residential customers.

The following are excerpts from a book to be published by Random House on Aug. 16. The author, who is a member of the New York City Ballet, wrote the book as a journal begun on Nov. 21, 1980, while she was still 22 and ended on Feb. 15, 1981. We live only to dance. If living were not an essential prerequisite, we would abstain. We have a different bodily structure than most humans. Our spirits, our souls, our love reside totally in our bodies, in our toes and knees and hips and vertebrae and necks and elbows and fingertips. Our faces are painted on. We draw black lines for eyes, red circles for cheekbones and ovals for a mouth. Any hint of facial wrinkles, teary eyes, drops of sweat, audible breathing or dimimishing energy levels is a sign of imperfection. They are symptoms of mortality.

A Different Response What a difference three months makes. Last May, the collapse of Drysdale Government Securities sent tremors through the credit markets and sent interest rates higher. Response to the latest crack in an increasingly leaky financial system - the failure of Lombard-Wall Inc. - has been altogether different, as key rates declined. And analysts say further reductions are likely. Slowly but surely, short-term credit demand is beginning to ease. In the past month, the volume of business loans has risen by 9.7 percent, far below the average 19.1 percent increase of the first half of the year.

Israeli dive-bombers and artillery last week gave west Beirut its worst pounding of the 10-week siege, threatening for a time to add American peacemaking efforts to the burgeoning casualty lists. A shocked President Reagan telephoned Prime Minister Menachem Begin to ''express his outrage'' at the killing of civilians and warned he was considering calling home his mediator, Philip C. Habib. The cease-fire was reinstated and Mr. Reagan later saw ''great reason for hope.'' Yesterday, he conferred with aides at Camp David to look beyond Beirut at the broader Middle East picture.

THE resignation of Joseph M. Margiotta from a $15,000-a-year patronage job on the State Senate Transportation Committee may signal that his leadership of the Nassau Republican organization is also nearing an end, several politicians believe. The resignation came as Nassau Republican politicians for the first time publicly questioned how long Mr. Margiotta could remain as leader after the initial appeal of his conviction on Federal mail fraud and extortion charges failed. Among those raising the question publicly were two allies, Nassau County Executive Francis T. Purcell and Thomas Pierce, the North Hempstead Republican chairman. Privately, party and public officials expressed doubts about Mr. Margiotta's tenure and the impact of his conviction on Republicans at the polls in November.

The House-Senate conference committee action today to retain tax exemptions for business meals reflected intense lobbying over the last several weeks. But for one of the lobbying groups, a union representing restaurant workers, the conferees' action turned an earlier victory into defeat. When the Senate Finance Committee voted last month to tighten tax collections on tips, the union representing waiters, waitresses and other employees who receive tips protested vigorously. The effort temporarily paid off Employees International Union; The Senate voted to reject the tips proposal. But in its place, as a revenue producing measure, the Senate voted to crack down on the ''three-martini lunch'' by reducing the tax deduction on such business-related meals to just half.

Can a purveyor of high-fidelity music systems whose store sits alongside the Lexington Avenue subway have listening rooms that are acoustically isolated from the rumble of passing trains? Michael Kay decided that he could, and on Sept. 14, at his expanded Lyric High Fidelity on Lexington between 82d and 83d Streets, he will unveil four ground-floor rooms that will be as remote, acoustically, from the IRT as the Gobi Desert.

FOR several days last month and earlier this month, the stately Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington had the type of security that museum directors wish for but rarely achieve because of the cost and the need to preserve the reverential atmosphere surrounding great works of art. Outside the museum's portico that resembles the Mt. Vernon home of George Washington, a gardener raked around the large bushes. Inside, young women accompanied the tours as guide trainees and men in business suits strolled through the rooms of what was once a private home, seemingly intent on the paintings by Manet, Monet, Degas and Whistler.