What was going on when I was born?

AS the National Football League begins its 63d season today, the d ifferences in the styles of play of the two conferences has all but d isappeared. It was not always thus. As recently as 1969, when such present prodigies as Lawrence Taylor, George Rogers, Marcus Allen and Cris Collinsworth were in the third, fourth or fifth grade, there were two rival leagues, the N.F.L. and the A.F.L. The American Football League teams joined the N.F.L. in 1970 to form the bulk of the American Football Conference. A decade earlier, when their rivalry began, the leagues were a world apart. The older, established N.F.L. played a conservative game. The upstart A.F.L. threw the ball like a basketball and, because defenses were new and seldom cohesive, touchdowns were cheap and the scores were often like basketball scores.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. WHAT you first notice about Bill Walsh, coach of the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers, is the weariness. During the football season, his face becomes the color of unbaked dough, and he continually tilts his head to one side like a martyr in a medieval painting. He is either suffering badly or burning up inside from a private calling. Whatever the cause, his face drains of blood. A week before the start of the 1982 football season, the sun shines harshly on the headquarters of the 49ers here. Walsh emerges from a pitch dark room where he has been studying game films. The weariness is already on his face. A cold sore has been forming over his lip and his right ear lobe is raw and flaking. Walsh has agreed to answer a few questions about his impact on professional football, but when someone asks him to be specific, a frown takes hold of his square features and he becomes impatient.

Churches and synagogues have been beset with special problems in these days of high energy costs because of their lofty cathedral ceilings and leaky stained-glass windows that waste vast amounts of precious heat. Other difficulties are posed by the need for extensive lighting -both outdoors and indoors - and the fact that a lot of extra fuel has to be used to heat spaces that are used for services or classes only once or twice a week.

HUNTINGTON ''I thought we'd better get the citizens back into what they did in the old days,'' said Inspector Harold McCormick of the Suffolk County Police Department. ''When I became commander of the Second Precinct here a year ago, whenever I had a call asking me, 'What are you doing about these burglaries?' I threw the question back and asked, 'What are you doing?' '' But the inspector himself was surprised at the success of the rapidly growing Neighborhood Watch program, to which he attributed a good part of the credit for a 21 percent drop in the precinct's burglary rate from July 1981 to July 1982. The Second Precinct, centered in Huntington, contains a population of 200,000 in an area of 100 square miles and is patrolled by 20 police cars. Inspector McCormick estimated that 15,000 people belonging to 40 units took part in Neighborhood Watch programs. The members of a Neighborhood Watch unit stay in their homes - or, if they go outside, on their own property -and keep a sharp eye out for suspicious events in adjacent driveways, front lawns and backyards.

JERSEY CITY IN THIS city, where politics often seems to be the vocation or avocation of almost everyone, there are many tales of bitter political feuds that have wrecked lifelong friendships, split families along political lines and played havoc with seating arrangements at weddings. But none of these feuds has lasted as long, or involved such bitter ironies, as the one between John Longo and J.Owen Grundy, whose friendship was forged - and eventually destroyed - by their zealous participation in reform politics. The feud between the two, both now septuagenarians, has been going on since the early 1940's. Mr. Longo, the son of immigrant parents, and Mr. Grundy, the son of a distinguished local family, first met in 1925 at Grammar School No. 12. ''J.Owen was an intellectual, an orator, and I followed him,'' Mr. Longo recalled. ''I wanted to know more about Mayor Frank Hague and why he had so much power.''

SCARSDALE ''THE eyes of Westchester are upon you,'' the head coach, Jim Gold, said on a recent morning, as Edgemont High School's varsity football squad engaged in its first practice of the season. ''As you know, we haven't had varsity football on campus for two years. Now's the time to prove it belongs here.'' Edgemont is the school that provided a key conversation topic among Westchester's coaches in 1980 when it decided to give up varsity football following a disastrous season. In nine games, the blue and white Panthers had failed to win a single game. The preceding year had produced almost as equally poor a season. Indeed, it had not had a winning year for more than a decade.

MARY MILLER'S son was 3 years old in 1973 when he was taken from his Long Island home by his father. He was 7 when Miss Miller located him in Massachusetts. When mother and son were reunited, two years ago, he was 10. Gloria Yerkovich is still searching for her daughter, Joanna, who disappeared in 1974 at the age of 6. Since that time, Mrs. Yerkovich has worked two jobs to pay off a $40,000 debt to lawyers and investigators hired during her search for Joanna. In 1980, she founded Child Find, a nonprofit organization created to locate missing children.

WASHINGTON EVEN though Israel has rejected President Reagan's Middle East initiative, and the Arab leaders have issued a plan of their own unacceptable to either the United States or Israel, the Reagan Administration is refusing to admit the worst. The goal of a lasting, effective and just peace in the Middle East ''can hardly be accomplished in a few short weeks,'' Secretary of State George P. Shultz told House and Senate committees last week. ''I don't think it is dead by any means.'' To Senator Paul Tsongas, who expressed some doubts, Mr. Shultz, an experienced negotiator, said ''we should not think that somehow or other there is a magic wand that can be raised and, quickly, something can be settled. I think there is a long haul here and we have to be ready for a long haul.''

KENNETH CLARK and Michele Klick badly wanted to buy a home of their o wn in time for their marriage Sept. 25. But when they found the h ouse they wanted in Edison, N.J., this summer, they began to wonder i f any bank would give them a mortgage loan. They were so young, theyh ad no credit history or large assets and were making only b eginners' salaries - he as a low-level manager at A.T.& T., she as af inancial analyst and computer programmer at the American Stock E xchange. ''We were sort of babies to be embarking upon this,'' said the 25-year-old Mr. Clark, who had never taken out a loan for anything before. ''Our annual income is $35,000 to $38,000 a year, and with that income, with the homes we were looking for going for $80,000 to $90,000, we were having doubts that we could be issued a mortgage.'' Today, however, the couple's biggest worries are over the wedding reception. In the mix of factors loan officers consider these days before making the dream of a house come true, Mr. Clark and Miss Klick found that even they could make the grade.

Ivan Lendl ended John McEnroe's three-year dominance in the United States Open tennis championships yesterday and joined Jimmy Connors in the men's final. Lendl's victory by 6-4, 6-4, 7-6 extended his string of Grand Prix triumphs over McEnroe to six in the last 18 months. During that span, McEnroe has won only one of their 17 sets. Connors opened the semifinals with a 6-1, 3-6, 6-2, 6-3 decision over Guillermo Vilas. Not even courtside hand signals from his coach, Ion Tiriac, could help the Argentine crack Connors.

THE pinkish-yellow glow rising from the Island at night is growing brighter as high-pressure sodium street lights replace older mercury vapor and incandescent fixtures. On the Long Island Expressway, along the state parkway system and down residential streets, high-pressure sodium is projected as the light of the future, lauded for energy efficiency and the broader cone of illumination that the electrically excited sodium vapors provide for motorists and security-conscious neighborhoods. Scattered incorporated villages will retain white, incandescent street lights, long the standard and the only kind of public lighting that illuminates the full color spectrum. But most towns and villages are either installing high-pressure sodium lights as replacements for burned-out bulbs, or they are stringing the new fixtures uniformly on utility poles and along new aluminum pole systems.

In the towering Chicago Board of Trade, where fortunes rise and fall with the price of grain, there are no bigger names than Edmund J. and William F. O'Connor. When the two brothers deal, the stakes are in the double-digit millions. But, like Texas' legendary Hunt and Bass brothers, the O'Connors keep their dealings shrouded in privacy, making them the object of much speculation. "People can't even imagine how much money they have," said one former business acquaintance of the O'Connors. "The answer seems to be huge to inexhaustible, but no one knows for sure." The O'Connors' footprints are everywhere. They oversee network of multimillion-dollar partnerships that stretch from the grain pits of Chicago to Wall Street, where they were among the most important players in such celebrated takeover battles as the Conoco-Du Pont merger and the scramble for Cities Service. They were prime movers in the formation of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, they have become involved in some nasty legal tussles with other brokerage houses and they have even mounted their own takeover battle for a large Middle Western cooling equipment manufacturer.