What was going on when I was born?

THE Glen Island Casino, the empty former nightclub on Long Island Sound that was popular in the Big Band era, is in the limelight again as Westchester County, which owns the casino and the park where it is located, renews its efforts to find an operator who will restore the facility's image. For more than two years, the administration of County Executive Alfred B. DelBello has been soliciting proposals from entrepreneurs in the hopes of realizing the potential of the New Rochelle site, where Glenn Miller, Ozzie Nelson, the Dorsey Brothers, Glen Gray, Claude Thornhill, Tommy Reynolds and Shep Fields once filled the hall with the sounds of swing. Tomorrow, the County Board of Legislators is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the administration's latest selection, a proposal by a group of investors who want to lease the casino for at least 10 and possibly 25 years and spend an estimated $1.7 million to make it a ''premier'' seafood restaurant and catering establishment, featuring weekly nostalgic ''Big Band nights.'' While the lease could be voted on by the Board tomorrow, setting the stage for the casino's revival perhaps next year, quick action seemed doubtful last week. Some of the lawmakers announced they would not be ready to decide until they could learn more about the proposed lease and the individuals who would be taking over the Casino. The administration, in April 1981, had proposed a lease with another bidder, the owners of the Lighthouse Restaurant in Yonkers.

FROM the outside, 444 West 22d Street offered a pleasant prospect, a four-story brick remindero f the days in the early 19th century when Chelsea was home to the l ikes of the poet and educator Clement Clarke Moore. It did not take a n expert eye to discern that the facade had recently undergone a t horough restoration. Inside, however, the town house failed to inspire similar confidence. In the basement was what looked to be an impossibly old boiler and long cracks ran through some of the walls. The view out back was of an ivy-encircled yard in disarray. For these reasons, the prospective buyers retained a private building inspector to help them calculate the cost of bringing the house, which had a sale price of $500,000, up to standard. This kind of assessment, however approximate, is increasingly being used by purchasers before they sign the papers - whether they plan to turn the house or cooperative apartment into an ideal dwelling or just a habitable one. Depending on how ambitious their schemes are, buyers might call in an inspector, an architect, a contractor or all three to help them judge not only the cost of obvious work but also to find any hidden problems and to figure the expenses that go with fixing them.

Turning abandoned railroad stations into restaurants, boutiques, roadhouses and similar establishments has become almost routine as train service has declined over the last three decades. But rarely has there been as ambitious a reclamation as that planned for the abandoned Lackawanna station on Grove Street in Montclair, N. J. With private investment of almost $10 million and a Federal grant of $1.48 million that has just won preliminary approval in Washington, the old station will be transformed by a development group, Montclair Center Associates, into Lackawanna Plaza, a shopping complex that will include a 50,000-square-foot supermarket for the Pathmark chain.

A RECENT decision by the United States Supreme Court has officials of Connecticut's 169 towns braced for antitrust suits against them - and also for a possible threat to the state's strong tradition of home rule. ''The court has ruled that we can be sued,'' said Michael L. Werner, the Mayor of Bristol and first vice president of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. ''It's really pretty scary.'' Mr. Werner referred to a January decision of the Court that said local municipalities were not automatically immune from antitrust legal actions.

NEW JERSEY is expected to play a major role in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's coming expansion in competitive business fields. The stage was set for the expansion when an antitrust agreement between the company and the Justice Department was signed by a judge last week. In return for giving up its 22 operating companies, A.T.& T. is allowed, under the agreement, to enter the growing field of telecommunications. ''Most of the expansion is in New Jersey,'' said Winston Hensworth, a securities analyst who follows A.T.& T. for Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. ''Just as I.B.M. scattered all over the Hudson Valley, A.T.& T. is moving to New Jersey.''

ATHENS, Ga. IN a peculiar way, each time Herschel Walker pulls on his No. 34 jersey and goes out to start a football season for the University of Georgia, he seems to be making his debut. That may be a curious notion, considering that Walker has gained nearly two miles on the ground his first two years in college - 3,507 yards, to be exact - and will, at that pace, break Tony Dorsett's National Collegiate Athletic Association career record of 6,082 yards by almost a thousand. So why does a potential 7,000-yard rusher, who breaks more tackles than Earl Campbell and could outsprint Dorsett without working up a sweat, have to prove himself every time he breaks that first huddle of the season? Because when Walker broke his thumb in Georgia's first full-contact scrimmage on Aug. 21, meaning that he will miss the Bulldogs' nationally televised opener against Clemson Sept. 6, it marked the third straight year he has done something in fall practice or after the season ended to question his status as a football player at Georgia.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Leslie Garisto frequently reports on the television scene. BY LESLIE GARISTO In London this week, dubbers Jesse and Carol Vogel are putting the final touches on the English-language version of ''Buddenbrooks,'' an 11-part co-produced adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel that will be presented on the Public Broadcasting Service in 1984. ''Buddenbrooks,'' which was originally shot with a soundtrack in German, is one of more than a dozen PBS-overseas co-productions currently in the works. At the same time, with an ever-expanding need to fill their schedules, cable and pay television services are buying more and more foreign films that require dubbing into English. Consequently, the highly specialized dubbing profession is experiencing a resurgence in New York these days, as dubbed films become an integral part of the American television experience.

The transfer of art treasures from one country to another is a practice that is as old as art itself. But recently, as prices for primitive art and antiquities have skyrocketed, there has been what some describe as an alarming increase in thefts and smuggling of cultural artifacts. The removal - legal or illegal - of objects often viewed by countries of their origin as significant to their national and cultural heritage, has caused mounting international concern. Over the last decade, governments and international agencies have, with mixed results, sought the cooperation of other nations as well as museums, collectors and dealers in returning such works. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cutural Organization passed a resolution in 1970 calling upon member nations to subscribe to a doctrine prohibiting international trafficking in national treasures - but not all countries have backed the program. Not included in the list of the 46 nations that have signed the resolution are Great Britain and the United States. The United States Senate ratified the convention in 1972, but Congress has never passed the implementing legislation. Many disputes involving the international traffic in such treasures have also ended up in the courts. But although the need for international agreements is recognized by governments and the art world alike, so far no body of law has been established for the successful resolution of most arguments.

THE bells, both door and telephone, will be ringing for 40,000 Westchester residents starting Wednesday. How the chosen answer the call could prove vital, not only for themselves and others in the county, but for the entire American population. All will be asked to participate in Cancer Prevention Study II, a six-year, $13 million, nationwide data-gathering effort sponsored by the American Cancer Society, in an attempt to learn more about a disease that currently strikes one out of every four people in the country. A similar study, conducted between 1959 and 1972, yielded a number of important findings, including evidence of a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. ''That was the major conclusion drawn from the first study,'' said Dr. Dorris J. Hutchison, president of the American Cancer Society's Westchester Division and head of the Laboratory of Drug Resistance and Cyto Regulation at the Sloan Kettering Institute, one of the world's most reknowned cancer research institutions, which has a facility in Rye.

President Reagan, setting the stage for another budgetary confrontation with Congress, announced today that he had vetoed the supplemental appropriations bill providing $14.1 billion to operate the Government until Sept. 30. Democratic leaders said today that they would make a strong effort to override the veto, rather than obey the President's request for a new bill providing $1 billion less in spending. Representative Jim Wright, the House majority leader, called the veto ''theatrical,'' but he declined to predict whether the attempt to override would be successful. Other Democratic leaders, while joining in the criticism of aspects of the veto message, stopped short for the moment of predicting a successful override campaign. (Page 19.) Larry Speakes, the deputy White House press secretary, announced that Mr. Reagan had approved ''a temporary emergency regulatory change'' to meet military payrolls for August by using the funds normally withheld from military paychecks for income and Social Security taxes.

State Medicaid officials across the country are using new authority to restrict eligibility, reduce benefits, charge for services and limit reimbursement of hospitals and nursing homes that provide medical care to poor people. The new rules are changing the shape of the Federal-state program created 17 years ago to finance medical care for the poor. The program now provides benefits to 22.9 million people, or one out of 10 Americans, at a total cost to Federal and state governments of $33.9 billion this year. No Changes Yet in Region Gov. James R. Thompson of Illinois, a Republican, summarized the attitude of officials in a growing number of states when he said, ''We cannot afford a Cadillac Medicaid program when a Chevrolet will do.'' Compared with other states, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have not made major changes to restrict eligibility or benefits. The states set eligibility criteria and define the scope of benefits within guidelines established by Washington. At the request of the Reagan Administration, Congress last year reduced by several percentage points the Federal Medicaid payment to each state. States could partly offset the reduction by taking costcontrol measures of their own.

WHEN agonizing pain sent Governor Kean to St. Barnabas Medical Center near his home in Livingston, the state's chief executive became another of the 6.5 million to 10 million Americans who, on any given day, have such a severe lower-back problem that they must take to their beds. What happens is that their back muscles freeze or lock - the way the Governor's did intermittently - in response to a signal from abused spinal nerves that the back's complex mechanisms are trying to avoid serious damage from continuing excessive pressure. Some physicians call this automatic protective shutdown ''nature's splint.'' Governor Kean is a trim, well-muscled, 6-foot-2 man of 47 who plays a hard game of tennis and whose threshold for handling pain is at least as high as that of most active males. But Paul Wolcott, a Kean spokesman, said that as the Governors' Conference in Oklahoma was nearing an end earlier this month, acute pain from a recurring back problem had begun to immobilize Mr. Kean.