What was going on when I was born?

Attracted by the concentration of Fortune 500 company headquarters in Westchester and Fairfield Counties, Holiday Inns has begun construction of hotels in White Plains and Stamford that will cater to corporate clients. According to Joseph Fuller, a White plains architect whose firm has designed both hotels, these new Holiday Inns ''will not look anything like'' the typical inn run by the chain.

As White House budget hands scurried about backstage last week trying to find the right numbers, their principal was front and center, looking to set the right tone. To mollify party moderates, President Reagan journeyed to Chicago for a fundraiser for Republican Senator Charles H. Percy, where he promised new proposals for job training for the unemployed. On the way, he dropped in on a nearby all-black parochial high school where, as if to reassure traditionalists, he emphasized the link between education and employment. At a cheerful news conference he celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration with a review of ''the accumulated damage'' in economic and international affairs he had inherited and the progress he had made. Yesterday, he covered his social agenda, promising in his weekly radio address to press for Congressional action on tuition tax credits for private schools, school prayer and abortion.

JOHN was a scientist employed by a large corporation. He performed well enough, but he was not working up to his potential. Later, in therapy, it emerged that his father had discouraged him even in childhood from being aggressive and intellectually assertive. Mary had always subordinated her professional concerns to those of her highly successful husband, but recently she began to climb the corporate ladder in her own field. The conflicting demands of work and family obligations took their psychological toll, however, and she sought a counselor to help her explore her priorities and thus perform better on the job.

TRENTON OFFICIALS representing the state's Department of Transportation and Amtrak met in Washington last week to begin work on a plan for passenger rail service between Philadelphia and Atlantic City by Sept. 30, 1985. The deadline for completion of the plan, under legislation signed by President Reagan on Jan. 14, is June 1. The legislation provided $30 million to link Amtrak's Northeast Corridor - the Washington-Boston line - with Atlantic City. The chairman of the New Jersey task force that will meet regularly with an Amtrak team to determine how best to spend the $30 million is Melvin Lehr, the Assistant Commissioner of Transportation.

Take a 1950's vintage shopping center, add some shrubbery, skylights, fountains, a big new anchor store and a group of fast-food restaurants serving ''international'' foods, and what have you got? The shopping mall of the 80's, according to Lorna Rudnick, vice president of marketing for Kravco Inc., which is supervising a $30 million renovation of the Green Acres Shopping Center in Valley Stream, L.I. Built in 1956, on a 92-acre site off Sunrise Highway, Green Acres was one of the first malls on the Island. Now, according to Miss Rudnick, Kravco and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., which are joint venture partners in the mall, have decided that it needs a facelift to keep it competitive.

WASHINGTON THE Democrats will have more control over the House of Representatives when it reconvenes on Tuesday, and nowhere is this more evident than in the committees. Since gaining 26 more House seats in the last election, the Democrats have a two-to-one edge over the Republicans. The Long Island delegation itself has changed from five Republicans and one Democrat last session to three Republicans and two Democrats, and the Democrats from Long Island, who have received good committee assignments, will benefit from their party's increased control in the House. The Republicans are used to being the minority party in the House, and it was only last session when a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans began to wield some power for the budget cutters. This session the Republicans will be less likely to fashion such a coalition.

It's been a long time since Flushing was a town, but the Town Hall that reminds the community of its roots still stands on Northern Boulevard. These days, however, the 1862 Romanesque Revival structure, which was declared a landmark in 1968, sports a sign advertising that medical office space can be rented inside.

Manhattan's large private teaching hospitals should eliminate 1,000 unneeded beds, consolidate expensive services and use space in other hospitals, a federally financed agency has recommended. The agency said its proposals would let the hospitals cut back more than $2 billion in planned construction. The recommendations represent the first specific program for reorganizing the city's varied health-care resources on a hospitalby-hospital basis. They were made by the New York City Health Systems Agency, which was created by Congress as a semi-independent Federal body to plan and review hospital expansion. The agency's report, described in an interview by its executive director, Anthony L. Watson, was referred to the New York State Hospital Review and Planning Council. The council has the regulatory power to approve or deny the hospitals' contruction plans.

The force of Ivan Lendl's serve and ground strokes overwhelmed Jimmy Connors, 6-3, 6-1, yesterday in the semifinals of the $400,000 Volvo Masters tennis tournament. It is premature to suggest that the swiftness and thoroughness of Lendl's 62-minute victory will instantly change the numbers at the top of the men's ranking. But with Bjorn Borg's unsettled future, Connors's age and Lendl's current dominance of John McEnroe, there is enough uncertainty to make today's Lendl-McEnroe final at Madison Square Garden worth more than the $100,000 first prize. McEnroe disposed of Guillermo Vilas, 6-3, 6-3, in the opening semifinal before a crowd of 18,309. At 3 P.M. today, he faces the defending Masters champion, who has won the last six of their nine matches, including 16 of 17 sets.

Salvadoran civilians are still being killed by the thousands annually, the Reagan Administration conceded last week, but the trend in official violence is down and the Government is ''making serious efforts to improve the situation.'' The State Department therefore duly certified El Salvador as entitled to receive $25 million in military aid that Congress has approved for fiscal 1983. Without the aid, Ambassador Deane R. Hinton argued, Government forces would probably be defeated by the leftist guerrillas.

Whither Inflation? December's 0.3 percent fall in the consumer price index confirms that double-digit inflation is over for some time to come, economists say. But with the economy poised for recovery, many of them think further reductions from last year's 3.9 percent rate are unlikely. The drop from the 13.4 percent pace of 1979 was even more dramatic than the fall after the last recession, raising hope that the inflationary spiral may have been broken. In 1976, after the last recession, prices rose 4.9 percent, down from their 12.3 percent jump in 1974.

WASHINGTON SOVIET and American negotiators are returning to the Geneva arms talks on Thursday after a remarkable week of polemics and posturing that tended to obscure the possibility that Washington and Moscow may yet reach agreements on nuclear weapons in Europe. Wheeling out the artillery for a hard-sell public relations war, each side has sought to persuade the West Europeans to buy its proposals. President Reagan said the Russians were using ''propaganda'' while he took the higher road of public relations, ''to remind those people that are hearing this propaganda, both here and in Europe, that what the Soviet Union is demanding is the right to maintain enough intermediate-range nuclear warheads to literally hit every population center in Europe. But they don't want a single weapon of a deterrent nature to be there on the other side.''