What was going on when I was born?

A New York City police captain has been fined $50,000 by the Police Department after admitting that he improperly solicited information from two detectives about grand jury testimony concerning police corruption in a Queens precinct. Department officials indicated that four or five other officers and detectives from that precinct - the 110th -are also expected to be brought up on departmental charges stemming from a two-year investigation by the state's special anticorruption prosecutor, Thomas A. Duffy Jr. Last month, the investigation led to the indictment and arrest on criminal charges of seven police officers, including two sergeants, who were or had been assigned to the 110th Precinct. As part of the agreement that resulted in the captain's guilty plea to the administrative charge, other departmental charges were dropped. The 53-year-old captain, Harold W. Coleman, a member of the police force for more than 27 years, was allowed to retire on a pension of at least $30,000 a year.

The Giants lost an exhibition game tonight but may have found their starting quarterback. The Pittsburgh Steelers beat them, 13-10, because the Giants kept giving the ball away in the second half.

After posting unsettling increases in May and June, the July consumer price index, due Tuesday from the Labor Department, should bring welcome relief. Thanks to easing energy prices and mortgage interest rates, analysts say the price index, which galloped along at double-digit rates late this spring, rose at about a 5 percent annual rate last month.

SALEM CENTER CRICKETS chirped in the warmth of a mowed field out behind Salem Feed and Supply. Across Route 116, two men moved slowly in the summer sun among the vehicles at the town of North Salem garage. The playground near St. James Episcopal Church on the east side of Route 124 was empty. Inside the feed store, baled hay stood in the corner, and sacks of cracked corn and ''16% sweet feed'' climbed the low walls behind the pot belly of a Magnum cast-iron stove.

The paired cities that face each other across the 1,960-mile border between the United States and Mexico are being battered by economic chaos because of the devaluations of the Mexico peso this year. On the Mexican side, residents of cities like Matamoros, accustomed to shopping in the United States for anything from shoes to milk, have found their purchasing power there cut by nearly two-thirds. So they are staying home to shop, and they find themselves competing for goods with Americans who are scurrying across the border to take advantage of the power that the dollar has gained in the Mexican marketplace. Meanwhile, the mercantile economies of American border cities like Brownsville, Matamoros's sister city across the Rio Grande, are in a state of shock. Brown Seeks Disaster Aid In California, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. has appealed to President Reagan for economic disaster aid for San Diego and Imperial Counties because of the devaluation.

THE long-awaited drop in interest rates appears to be under way, or a t least that was the good news from Wall Street last week. The d ecline in short-term interest rates, which began in late June, f inally spread in earnest to the long-term bond market. But the exuberance in the financial markets seemed to lack conviction that better days were ahead. In fact, the higher prices in the bond market could be construed as a celebration of hard times for the rest of the economy. The sad fact is that interest rates have stayed stubbornly high until nearly a third of the nation's manufacturing capacity was standing idle, unemployment was at a post-World War II high of 9.8 percent and the bankers were looking grim and weary from a growing list of domestic and foreign borrowers who were unable to repay their debt. ''The long-term trend in rates is definitely downward,'' said Robert Schwartz, an economist at Merrill Lynch Government Securities Inc. ''But there are still some major problems.''

The Yankees wasted one of Ron Guidry's finer games of the season last night by managing only three hits against Jim Clancy and losing, 3-1, to the Toronto Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium. After giving up three first-inning runs on four hits, Guidry held the last-place Blue Jays to two more hits in eight shutout innings and struck out 10, the most batters he has struck out in a game since 1979. ''If you give up runs in the first inning, you have to make sure that's it,'' said Guidry, who explained that he mixed more changeups with his fastballs after the second inning. ''I just didn't get any breaks tonight. They scored fast, scored first, and that was pretty much the ball game.''

IN the latest feuding among Suffolk Republicans, the county's District Attorney is investigating charges of possible political bribery. Anthony J. Prudenti, the Suffolk Republican leader, has asked District Attorney Patrick Henry to determine whether there have been any illegal links between threatened primary fights for the Assembly and State Senate in Babylon and Islip and ambitions for the most lucrative patronage job in the county, the $60,000 chairmanship of the Offtrack Betting Corporation. In question is whether any candidate is dropping out of a primary race because he has been promised the OTB job, which is an appointive post filled by the Suffolk County Legislature on the recommendation of county Republican leaders. Art Penny, a spokesman for Mr. Henry, acknowledged that that the investigation was under way, and a Republican leader, Frank Apollaro of Smithtown, said that he had been questioned and that several other G.O.P. town leaders were or would be questioned by the District Attorney.

TOMORROW marks a big day in the brief history of Rye Brook, the county's first new village in 54 years. Voters will go to the polls to elect a mayor and four trustees. That means Lee Russillo will no longer have the distinction of being the only village official, her lot since July 19, when she was sworn in as Rye Brook's first Village Clerk. On June 23, by a vote of 1,991 to 1,434, residents of what was once the unincorporated area of the town of Rye created the new three-anda-half-square-mile village of 8,000 people; 16 days later, New York's Secretary of State, Basil Paterson, signed the incorporation certificate. Four days after receiving the document, Town Clerk Frances Nugent of Rye swore in Mrs. Russillo, whose primary responsibility has been to insure that tomorrow's voting, which she expects will be heavy, goes smoothly. ''I was chosen because I had helped with school elections,'' explained Mrs. Russillo, who works for the Blind Brook School System. ''My job right now is assembling the new voting books.'' Because there are no village offices, Mrs. Russillo has been running the government from her home. ''You should see what my dining room looks like,'' she said with a laugh. ''Rye Brook currently exists on the dining room table.''

The big new flower on diction's dungheap is four syllables long, blooms all the year round and is omnipresent in discussion of new architecture, new art, new dance, new design, new music and new theater. It can be applied to a tall public building in Portland, Ore., and to the future headquarters of Humana, Inc., in Louisville, Ky. Both of these are designed by Michael Graves. It can be applied to a teapot that looks like a combination of Gothic tomb and fringed Victorian piano leg (likewise designed by Mr. Graves), and to a piece of music by Steve Reich for unaccompanied clapping hands, a painting by Malcolm Morley in which camels bulk and bulge in ways unknown to zoology, a song by Laurie Anderson that might have caught the fancy of just one or two people but happens to be high up on the charts, and a dance piece by Charles Moulton in which very good dancers stand around and pass small rubber balls from hand to hand.

BRIDGEPORT ONE day in late June, John B. Hahn Jr., the City Comptroller, was shuffling through his usual mail - invitations to municipal finance seminars, requests for revenue projections -when he came upon a most unusual missive. Someone he did not know wanted to buy a sculpture he had never heard of for a price ''that you would find most attractive,'' as the letter put it. ''I thought it was a mistake,'' said Mr. Hahn, who had been in Bridgeport only seven months. But he soon learned that this industrial city indeed owned a valuable sculpture, one of 19 marble copies of ''Pandora'' by Charles Bradley Ives.

WHILE this summer's tomato crop is reaching the peak of the harvest and home gardeners are gathering their Big Boys, Big Girls and Jetstars, Lance Ladd is harvesting tomatoes with names such as Royal Chico, Bragger and Tumblin' Tom. They are three of the 85 varieties he raised this summer at his retail nursery outlet, Ladd's, on Route 32 in South Windham. The number alone would seem to establish his pre-eminence among professional growers, most of whom raise no more than a half-dozen of the best known kinds. For Mr. Ladd, however, the numbers are not aimed at a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records but are the result of a curiosity that began when he was a boy, helping out in the summer with his family's vegetable garden. Now, at the age of 23, he has made tomatoes his business as well as a pleasure and has attracted a clientele of tomato connoisseurs, who come to him for hard-to-find varieties and with whom he exchanges information.