What was going on when I was born?

WITH 30,000 new cancer cases a year being reported in New Jersey, health officials are turning their attention to the work environment, hoping to find and get rid of carcinogens at the point of exposure. Until recently, exact figures linking occupational exposures and cancer cases had not been available because information was not being reported with such analyses in mind, according to Dr. Kenneth D. Rosenman, director of occupational and environmental health services for the state's Department of Health. The data are now being correlated, however, and Dr. Rosenman predicted that reports in the next few months could show as many as 12,000 new occupationally induced cancer cases a year. ''There have been various estimates comparing cancer to occupation,'' Dr. Rosenman said. ''The National Cancer Institute estimates it at 4 percent, whereas the National Institutes of Health puts the figure at 40 percent.

The near-blizzard that stormed into the Northeast sector of the country on Friday continued yesterday to force postponements and cancellations of athletic events, including the Vitalis/ U.S. Olympic Invitational track-and-field meet at Byrne Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. The snow also forced the indefinite postponement of a National Hockey League game between Toronto and the Bruins in Boston, closed most of the thoroughbred and harness racing tracks in the affected area and forced officials to put off dozens of college basketball games, including Connecticut at St. John's. The track-and-field meet was rescheduled for Sunday, Feb. 27, after meet officials decided to bow to local transportation problems and the inability of many athletes get to the arena. The official said they hope to hold the competition in the afternoon, rather than at night, as is customary, although they are not certain the arena will be ready after a Saturday night basketball game.

FOR decades, this mill town in the West Virginia panhandle was noted in American industry, first because it was one of the biggest company towns in America, then because Ernest T. Weir, the company's founder and a self made industrialist, so fiercely fought unions and the labor policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, the town is talked about for a new reason: Workers, townspeople and company executives have joined forces in an enthusiastic effort to put together what could be the largest Employee Stock Ownership Plan in the country. Under it, the Weirton steelworks, the state's largest employer and its biggest taxpayer, would be bought from the National Steel Corporation by the plant's workers. Negotiators trying to set up an ESOP at Wierton are reportedly very close to an agreement, and ESOP leaders hope and that a plan can be completed within two weeks so that plant employees will be able to vote on it in March or April. ''The only way out is to be competitive and that's what this ESOP is all about,'' said Jack Redline, president of the Weirton steelworks, who sees the plan as providing a lesson for industries where labor and management are at odds and which have lost competitiveness because of high labor costs.

THE STORIES OF BREECE D'J PANCAKE Foreword by James Alan McPherson. Afterword by John Casey. 178 pp. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown & Co. $13.50. TWELVE stories, set in an impoverished region of West Virginia, by a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's, when the interrelated stories and prose pieces of ''In Our Time'' were published in 1924: this the good news. The tragic news is that this slender volume is all we will have of Breece D'J Pancake's work, since he committed suicide in 1979, when he was not quite 27 years old. Precisely why he killed himself at the very start of what promised to be a remarkable career is a mystery, though both James Alan McPherson and John Casey, who knew him as a student in the writing program at the Universty of Virginia, set forth a number of clues. Breece Pancake (a typesetter once printed his middle initials as D'J, and he adopted the oddity) ''didn't know how good he was,'' Mr. Casey says in his poignant memoir; ''he didn't know how much he knew; he didn't know that he was a swan instead of an ugly duckling.'' But the stories -tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past's dominion over the present - argue for a sensibility so finely honed, so vulnerable to the inexorable passage of time, that it is likely death appeared as a solace. As the stories make powerfully clear, Breece Pancake identified so intensely with the coal-mining and farming area of West Virginia in which he was born that he could not have failed to identify with its slow dying as well.

Doug Henning, the magic man, wasn't always the most lovable whiz of a wiz. Once upon a time, he found it intriguing to test the unwary. He'd be sitting at a restaurant counter, and half-dollars would just keep materializing under the plates as the astonished waitress swept them away. He would hand over his money at the cash register and the bills would vanish - to the befuddlement of the cashier. Or the magician would slip into a supermarket, break open a seeded roll, and find a coin inside. He'd smile his gee-wizard grin and say, ''Well look at that!'' prompting onlookers to attack other rolls, hunting for pennies from heaven. ''I learned,'' said Mr. Henning, ''that people didn't like it.'' He was taking a break on a recent afternoon, during the unceasing rehearsals for ''Merlin,'' the musical that opens today at the Mark Hellinger Theater. ''People would feel betrayed,'' he said. ''They'd get mad. And I learned something very important about myself, and about magic.'' Which was? ''I came to understand that I used magic for ego gratification, to show off at parties,'' Mr. Henning replied. ''It's the sort of magician Merlin is in the play. But the conceited Merlin grows and changes during the show.'' He paused. ''And so have I, through the years.''

Japan's trade minister told President Reagan's trade representative today that he favored a proposal to restrain automobile exports to the United States for a third year. At the same time Japanese officials said they had agreed to limit exports of videotape recorders to the European Economic Community for three years. As part of the pact, Japan said it would establish a minimum price system governing video recorder shipments to Western Europe and agreed to guarantee European producers sales of 1.2 million units a year. Effort to Use Self-Restraint The statement of intention on limiting car exports to the United States and the agreement on video recorders were seen by Western officials as an effort at self-restraint to forestall protectionist measures by Japan's trading partners.

When Martin Scorsese first read the script for ''The King of Comedy'' in 1974, he dismissed it as a one-gag film. The story of an ambitious young comic who kidnaps a famous talk-show host in order to get himself on television didn't interest him at all. Years passed, and Mr. Scorsese directed, with much acclaim, such movies as ''Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,'' ''Taxi Driver,'' ''New York, New York'' and ''Raging Bull.'' When he read the script of ''King of Comedy'' again in 1979, he says he finally understood what it was all about. Indeed the film - which opens this Friday at the Coronet - had taken on an intensely personal resonance for him. It would provide him with a means not only for making important stylistic experiments, but also for taking stock of his own career - for reassessing his early ambition and the consequences of his more recent success. In ''The King of Comedy'' Robert De Niro plays a novice comedian named Rupert Pupkin, who will do anything, anything, to get Jerry Langford, a television personality played by Jerry Lewis, to invite him to perform on his show. Pupkin wheedles, he whines, he makes a complete pest of himself, and when that doesn't work, he resorts to kidnapping and ransom. His ambition is blind and crazy, says Mr. Scorsese, and it is based on his own youthful will to succeed at any price.

VENTNOR THIS barrier-island community whose name is familiar to millions of Monopoly players is about to find itself, like Berlin, a city divided. The Dorsett Avenue Bridge, its only bridge link to the mainland, is to be closed for repairs - in its ''up'' position - next month. Although the contract calls for a 25-day shutdown, some engineers say the repairs could take months, and city, police and fire officials fear there may be public-safety emergencies. The drawbridge is 53 years old, and its worn machinery groans every time its two spans are opened to boats using the Ventnor segment of the Intracoastal Waterway. It connects the main part of Ventnor, on the Atlantic Ocean side, with Ventnor Heights, on the mainland side.

THE recession that has engulfed the country is threatening to claim another victim -Westchester's municipal recycling programs. During the last six months five municipalities have stopped recycling paper, aluminum and glass, and many others are ready to stop their programs if no way is found to make them pay for themselves. The main problem is the market for paper products. Three mills that were buying used paper in the region have gone out of business in the last two years, and prices have dropped radically. Towns that were getting $40 a ton for paper are now being paid as little as $5.

NO FOND RETURN OF LOVE By Barbara Pym. 254 pp. New York: E.P. Dutton. $12.95. LUCKILY for all of us, Barbara Pym's novels continue to stream forth long after we'd expected to have to start doing without. She died in 1980, having just completed ''A Few Green Leaves'' - her last book, American readers thought sadly; but they reckoned without the reissues of earlier works previously printed only in England. Most recently it looked as if the last would be a paperback edition of ''Jane and Prudence.'' (And what a way to end up! Pure hilarity.) Now there's ''No Fond Return of Love,'' with a publisher's list promising even more after this one.

HOW serious is Nassau County's fiscal problem? ''It's real, no doubt about it,'' said Peter King, the County Comptroller. ''Very severe,'' said Richard M. Kessel, a civic activist. ''I think we're outdoing Abe Beame because we are underplaying the numbers. In December and January the county said there was no deficit. Now they admit it's $36.7 million with a potential for $50 million, and I feel it's closer to $70 million.'' Abraham D. Beame was the Mayor of New York City at the onset of its the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970's. ''We have a fiscal problem,'' said the County Executive, Francis T. Purcell. ''I do not intend to let it turn into a crisis.'' While opinions differed last week on the severity of the county's financial problem, as well as on possible solutions, there was agreement on at least one of its causes: inflation.

JERSEY CITY VOTERS here will have a chance Tuesday to turn back the clock to the city commission form of government and the era of Frank Hague. Jersey City converted from the five-member city commission to the present form, a mayor and nine councilmen, in 1962, and the current drive to reverse the process appears aimed more at unseating Mayor Gerald McCann than at establishing a more-efficient system of government. The leaders of the government-change organization, called CARE (Community Action for a Responsive and Efficient government), are Paul J. Byrne, former director of the city's Economic Development Corporation, and Richard Accurso, a businessman.