What was going on when I was born?

ON the eve of Thanksgiving Day the new grandmother was up to her elbows in cranberry sauce and bragging about the baby again: ''He's the most beautiful, smart, funny, unique, absolutely incredible grandbaby. He's seven months old and his name is Rafael. Rafael Friedan.'' Her name is Betty Friedan. Her new role has made her the envy of contemporaries in the feminist movement, it seems. ''They're dying, dying for their children to produce grandchildren,'' said Mrs. Friedan, a 61-year-old mother of three who knows the feeling. ''It's a basic generative urge not unique to women. I think there will be a sharper savoring of the experience with this generation of grandparents because we cannot take it for granted as much.''

They have never heard of the Pilgrims. Plymouth Rock might as well be a new kind of dance or a type of car. They have only eaten cranberry sauce as a jam on bread, and the only place they have ever expressed their thanks before is inside a cathedral. But no matter that they are not especially fond of turkey or that it makes no sense to them to stage a celebration on a Thursday instead of a weekend night, members of the Niquio family -who arrived in the United States several months ago from Argentina - will be sitting down today to their first Thanksgiving dinner. Like so many other newcomers to this country, Mr. and Mrs. Rodolfo Niquio do not always understand American customs. Thanksgiving appeared one day out of nowhere, with its explosion of crepe paper turkeys and cardboard leaves, and suddenly their building in Elmhurst, Queens, was aflutter with talk of what to put in the stuffing.

First article of a series appearing periodically on world economic problems. Not since the Depression of 50 years ago have the nations of the world faced such a bewildering multitude of economic and financial problems. In country after country, as if caught in a global epidemic, the world is afflicted with high unemployment and falling production and is beset by sagging trade, failing businesses and huge foreign debts. ''There is hardly a place in the world where countries are not in economic difficulty,'' says George W. Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and now a consultant to Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. ''The Soviet Union and Communist countries are in desperate trouble, and in the West it is hard to find a bright spot.'' Robert D. Hormats, who stepped down as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs in August to become director of Goldman, Sachs International, calls today's array of problems ''the greatest test to the prosperity of the postwar period that the world has faced.''

An article yesterday about the Octo- ber increase in the Consumer Price Index misstated the 1981 increase. It was 8.9 percent.

By all appearances, Eduardo Orozco-Prada was a very successful coffee importer. He lived on a two-acre estate in an affluent New York suburb, with an indoor swimming pool in a half-million-dollar home. From offices on Wall Street, Mr. Orozco owned or controlled numerous companies and had accounts in some of New York's biggest banks. Through these accounts and companies, Mr. Orozco, his brother and other associates moved tens of mil Last of two articles. lions of dollars in cash, say Federal authorities, whose curiosity was piqued by the large money flow. Was the 43-year-old Mr. Orozco a terrific exporter-importer, investigators asked, or was his wealth primarily from another source - money laundering?

International The Israeli commission of inquiry on the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut notified Prime Minister Menachem Begin and eight other top officials that there was a possibility they might be harmed by its findings. The panel said Mr. Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon might be found to have failed in their duties by ignoring the dangers of asking Lebanese Christian militiamen to go into the Palestinian refugee camps and, in the cases of some of the other officials, by neglecting to report or act quickly to halt the killings. (Page A1, Column 4.) Foreign Miniser Yitzhak Shamir testified it was not true that a fellow Israeli Cabinet member told him Sept. 17 that Lebanese Christian militiamen were killing Palestinian civilians in Beirut. In a 40-minute appearance before the Israeli judicial commission investigating Israeli involvement in the killings, Mr. Shamir denied testimony given by Communications Minister Mordechai Zipori. (A10:4.)

The nation's three largest auto makers reported a surge in car sales in mid-November, largely because of incentive programs that featured lower interest rates on auto loans. The 41.7 percent increase was the largest for any of the industry's 10-day sales periods since March 1976. But analysts said the jump did not signal a significant improvement in auto sales, which have been in a slump for more than three years. 11 Percent Financing ''I'm pleased, but it's not something to start popping champagne corks about,'' said Harvey Heinbach, an auto analyst with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. ''We won't really know the strength of the market until we see improvements without the incentives. For now, though, these programs are doing a good job of reducing dealer inventories.''

The Department of Transportation, turning away from an earlier plan, now favors a 5-cent-a-gallon increase in the Federal gasoline tax to finance the Federal share of President Reagan's proposed $32.9 billion program to rehabilitate highways and assist mass transit systems. Under the tentative plan, endorsed by President Reagan Tuesday and outlined by Transportation officials today, the increase in the gasoline tax to 9 cents a gallon from 4 cents would be assessed on refiners. They would be expected to pass along the cost to consumers at the pump.

Administration officials are preparing for President Reagan's consideration a package of proposals for combating unemployment that a White House spokesman said today would be ''far more comprehensive'' than the highway repair measure the President endorsed for passage in Congress's special session. The spokesman, Larry Speakes, said the package to be presented to the President would be shaped from seven or eight proposals under consideration by a council of Cabinet members. He said Mr. Reagan was not likely to decide on the package until the regular session of Congress in January. No Details Disclosed Mr. Speakes, who is here at the Western White House for the President's Thanksgiving visit, declined to disclose details but said the proposals dealt in part with chronic unemployment, particularly among the young.

At 4:30 P.M. Tuesday, the moment listed in the itinerary, five huge red and silver motor coaches pulled away from the front of Chrysler High School in New Castle, Ind., and headed up Parkview Drive for Macy's Thanksgiving Parade in New York. It was rainy and cold, but that was not depressing to the 167 members of the Chrysler High School Trojan Marching Band, nor to 46 other people on the buses, including the principal, the band director, chaperones and guides. A police car, its red light flashing, escorted the buses up Parkview Drive and then south on Route 3 toward I-70. All along the route, people waved, drivers honked their horns. On the caravan went, past K-Mart, the Noble Roman Pizza Parlor, McDonald's, the Walrus record shop. The band members cheered and waved back to the town people. Near the edge of town, a huge flashing sign at the Henry County Savings and Loan said: ''Trojan Band. See You on TV.'' A student wrote in the condensation on the bus window: ''Here We Come, New York.''

WHILE most apartment renovations are made-to-measure projects, some, like good English tailoring, just fit their owners better than others. The Central Park West apartment of Ashton Hawkins, for example, is like a custom-made suit: It becomes the wearer perfectly, and many of its best qualities are, at first glance, undetectable. It is a rather quiet, personal apartment with a sense of the Old World tempered with a lively collection of modern art, precisely what one might expect from its occupant, a worldly, self-assured individual who frequently entertains. Mr. Hawkins, who is vice president, secretary and counsel of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wanted his home flexible enough to have parties for two dozen or two hundred people, yet comfortable and private enough for him to enjoy living there alone. He also wanted the place to function as a background for his art collection and his many and varied mementos.

A world trade conference here opened today on a discordant note, with the French Foreign Trade Minister questioning the value of the sessions and directing harsh criticism at the United States. ''Are we to go through the motions of a ritual exercise, or face the real problem?'' the minister, Michel Jobert, asked the conference of 88 nations that are members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. ''It is paradoxical to concentrate on current trade tensions, while the real problems result from an unprecedented crisis in production.'' The minister argued that the cause of troubles that have led to 30 million jobless in the industrialized world was not the trading system, but high interest rates and the ''uncertainty provoked by erratic and incessant fluctuations in currency values.''