What was going on when I was born?

The Reagan Administration today suspended a grading standard that provides consumers with information for comparing the durability of tires. The Administration and most major manufacturers of replacement tires, a $6 billion industry in 1982, contend that the tread-wear grading system is unscientific and that consumers may be misled by it. The system covers 93 brands of automobile tires in 2,500 sizes and styles. Raymond A. Peck, Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said today: ''We just cannot reliably tell whether a higher-graded tire will wear better than a lower-graded tire. The standard is not only failing in its primary purpose of informing consumers, it is misleading some of them.''

''They were going for milk and honey and they are coming back weeping tears.'' - The Rev. Anastasius Dzodofe of Ghana, commenting on his expelled countrymen. (A13:6.)

For the stage-struck in the suburbs, this is the hour of angst. Auditions for the spring season are at hand, and they're enough to make make even the most seasoned amateur thespian shudder. ''I was terrible,'' said Robert Bromberg, a traveling salesman from Monsey, N.Y. ''I was driving around all day in my car rehearsing my song. But at the audition I couldn't modulate my voice. I went to pieces completely. I went home with my head between my legs.''

''ISN'T it strange to be doing this in the middle of New York?'' Paula Perlis was saying. ''I mean downtown, in a major city?'' Mrs. Perlis, a food consultant, and four of her friends were sitting around a quilting frame, stitching a colorful patchwork quilt together. It is something they do every Wednesday night in the kitchen of Laura Priko, an expert quilter who lives on Vandam Street in Lower Manhattan. The women, most of whom live in nearby brownstones, are among the growing number who are holding regular quilting bees throughout the metropolitan area. While the Vandam Street group is unnamed, most of the others have names: the Ladies of the Evening Quilt Club in Ridgefield, Conn.; the City Quilters in Brooklyn; the Good Wives in Darien, Conn.; the Empire Quilt Club in Brooklyn and Manhattan; the Hat City Quilters in Danbury, Conn., and the Huntington Quilters Society on Long Island.

Ghanaian military and civilian officials trying to organize the often-chaotic repatriation of refugees from Nigeria said today that the number of Ghanaian citizens expelled might be as high as two million, possibly more. The officials are trying to feed and cure and find transportation for the tens of thousands of refugees passing each day through an improvised camp at this town a few miles across the border from Lome, the capital of Togo. So far, the officials estimate that more than half a million refugees have been through the camp in the last five days. Perhaps 25,000 more passed through today, in cattle trucks, vans, taxis and on foot, and 15,000 more milled around the camp, sporadically creating near-riots, running, shoving and grappling with one another and with Ghanaian soldiers each time a new supply of bread or water arrived.

IN THE BACKYARD OF BEVERLY HILLS, SECURITY AND FITNESS ARE THE FOCUS By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI ABOUT a year ago on the ''Tonight'' show, Johnny Carson described a backyard barbecue at his Beverly Hills home and acknowledged that, well, it had all been pretty casual - he had simply grilled the steaks on the electric fence. For Mr. Carson and other Beverly Hills residents, California may be a backyard way of life, but as the city's former Mayor, Joseph Tilem, says, ''Security is a major preoccupation - a basic adjunct of living here.'' Dress is casual, and the mature trees and expansive lawns do unify the residential townscape into a lot-by-lot park; but the well-hidden agenda of these private Edens is protection. A high-visibility entertainer like Mr. Carson knows that the first line of defense against intruders is the yard. Six-foot fences, with a backfield of German shepherds, Rotweilers or Dobermans, are the time-honored protection, but homeowners - especially in the more affluent parts of the city - also choose from an array of systems that protect the house while leaving the pastoral illusion intact.

A New York Federal court jury yesterday awarded what is believed to be the first punitive damages ever assessed against an insurance company for its refusal to pay a claim. After a six-day trial before United States District Judge Henry Werker, the Source Commodities Corporation won a $300,000 judgment against the Aetna Casualty and Surety Company for Aetna's refusal to pay a claim under a policy insuring Source against losses caused by the dishonest acts of its employees. The judgment against Aetna Casualty, a unit of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, includes $100,000 of compensatory damages and $200,000 for punitive damages.

They came from lands that were broken, lured by a dream of riches in a nation that glittered with the slick sheen of oil. In hundreds of thousands, Africans poured into Nigeria, the continent's wealthiest and already most populous nation, in quest of fortunes withheld by poverty at home. But, last month, the mirage crumbled before them. Nigeria, ensnared in economic crisis, ordered aliens living illegally within its boundaries to leave, and a great exodus began. The expulsion represents one of the largest forced migrations in Africa since the Zulu King Chaka sent rival potentates fleeing his wrath across southern Africa in the mid-19th century. It has brought abrupt misery to the aliens, predominantly Ghanaians who had escaped their own country's lurch into poverty only to discover that Nigeria's vision of plenty could not withstand the faltering of the world's oil markets. So they are leaving, docile and somber, their future as opaque as the harmattan that is blowing now, south from the Sahara, to blot out the sun over Lagos and transfix the city's high-rises and slums in a gray luminosity.

President Reagan, in his second Economic Report to Congress, gave strong support today to the Federal Reserve's efforts to foster an economic recovery. He rejected arguments that Fed policy was becoming inflationary. ''Monetary policy will play a critical role in achieving a sound and sustainable economic recovery,'' the President said. ''I expect that in 1983 the Federal Reserve will expand the money supply Reagan Economic Report, page D19. at a moderate rate consistent with both a sustained recovery and continued progress against inflation.''

Administration officials told Congress today that they were anxious about the situation in El Salvador following the fall of the southeastern town of Berlin to guerrilla forces. And the officials, including Thomas O. Enders, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, conceded under angry questioning from several senators that United States policy in El Salvador was ''confused'' and had resulted in the Salvadorans' receiving ''mixed signals.'' In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the officials offered the Administration's first defense on Capital Hill of its policy in El Salvador since President Reagan certified Jan. 21 that the Salvadoran Government had made significant gains in human rights and in political and economic reforms. Certification Called a Farce Although the certification is required every six months by Congress as a condition for continued military aid to El Salvador, the procedure itself was strongly criticized at the hearing, as was Administration policy.

Four employees of the city's Sanitation Department were among seven people charged yesterday in connection with the theft of $150,000 worth of postage stamps that were supposed to have been destroyed in a city incinerator. The four worked at the Southwest Incinerator Plant in Coney Island, where more than $16 million worth of stamps were sent over the last year, according to Raymond Bonney, a postal inspector. At a news conference at the Brooklyn Post Office at Cadman Plaza, authorities displayed $150,000 in unused stamps that they said they seized in a Jan. 27 raid at the Brooklyn home of one of the employees, Fred Amodeo.

A $30 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to Nicaragua, which the Reagan Administration has blocked twice in the last 18 months, will almost certainly be approved later this month, according to delegates to the bank. Approval will come primarily because Argentina and Chile, which sided with the United States on two previous occasions, have decided to vote in favor of the loan, according to diplomats from those countries. Officials of the bank and outside observers of its activities said the shift in positions, especially by Argentina, was attributable to Nicaragua's support of Argentina during its war against Britain over the Falkland Islands. Critics charge that the United States has been using the international lending institution in its efforts to destabilize Nicaragua's Sandinist Government, which has been in power since July 1979. American officials have said, however, that the economic policies of the Sandinist leaders -avowedly Marxist - make it doubtful that the loan would be repaid.