What was going on when I was born?

Chicago officials of the Environmental Protection Agency said today that they had been ordered to change a report on dioxin contamination to comply with demands made by the Dow Chemical Company. They said the changes were ordered by their superiors in Washington and included the deletion of a sentence saying the agency had concluded: ''Dow's discharge represented the major source, if not the only source of TCDD contamination found in the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay in Michigan.'' TCDD is one form of dioxin, which is believed to be the most toxic chemical made by man. Speculation on Nominees The regional officials testified before a House subcommittee in the latest development in the three-month furor over the Environmental Protection Agency.

The stream of illegal aliens pouring into the United States has become a torrent, driven by the currency crisis that has shattered the Mexican economy. The Border Patrol is inundated, and the 2,000-mile border has turned into something more like a series of commuter stations than an international boundary. So far this year, the number of deportable aliens captured and returned to Mexico is up almost 50 percent from last year, and what the patrol calls the spring deluge is yet to come. Peso devaluations in 1982 have sharply reduced Mexicans' buying power at home and made dollars more valuable there. The Daily Thousands Each day, thousands of Mexican men, women and children wade in full view across the skimpy Rio Grande or walk across the dusty plains and sandy desert hills to the American side. Perhaps one in three will be apprehended by the thin line of Border Patrol officers and bused back, but they will try again in a matter of hours.

Amid the burned-out tenements and empty lots of the South Bronx, two single-family, ranch-style houses, complete with cathedral ceilings and aluminum siding have been erected. s The houses, looking as if they had been plucked from suburbia, are part of a city-supported effort to retain middle-class residents in the neighborhood, The suburban look, which will include white picket fences, is not unplanned. The developers said they wanted the project, which will have 90 houses and is known as Charlotte Gardens, to resemble the suburbs that have for so long tempted people to leave the South Bronx. ''The suburban look is helpful,'' said Edward J. Logue, the president of the South Bronx Development Organization, the city agency responsible for the project. ''Where did you think people went when they got enough money to leave the South Bronx? To the suburbs.''

Governor Cuomo and legislative leaders announced a general agreement tonight on a state budget for the new fiscal year that sharply reduces the need for layoffs and restores many programs favored by the State Legislature. ''This budget, when passed, should be a sound, responsible, careful document that wins us a great deal of credibility,'' Governor Cuomo said in a news conference in the Red Room of the Capitol, ''especially since it is the product of all the legislative leadership working with the Governor.'' Together for Announcement At his side were the Assembly Speaker, Stanley Fink, Democrat of Brooklyn; the Senate majority leader, Warren M. Anderson, Republican of Binghamton; the Assembly minority leader, Clarence D. Rappleyea Jr., Republican of Norwich, and the Senate minority leader, Manfred Ohrenstein, Democrat of Manhattan. The budget, agreed upon after weeks of negotiation, provides for more than $900 million in new and expanded taxes proposed by Governor Cuomo, but does not contain a key measure - an expansion of the sales tax to include movie and theater tickets, haircuts, dry cleaning and other services.

A Federal judge ruled yesterday that the City University of New York had discriminated unlawfully against women on its teaching staff for 15 years by paying them less than men in equivalent positions. Back pay and damages for thousands of women could run into millions of dollars. The decision, by Judge Lee P. Gagliardi of United States District Court in Manhattan, was based largely on a statistical examination of salaries. It came in a class-action suit filed in 1973 by 25 women employed at most of the university's 17 senior and community colleges.

The decision by Atari Inc. last month to move 1,700 assembly jobs from California to Asia has raised questions of whether high technology will revive the American job market. Many economists and other analysts expect more high-technology companies to follow Atari, a division of Warner Communications, overseas. The hope had been that these companies would provide assembly-line jobs for workers laid off from faltering smokestack industries. But Atari's move, expected to be completed by July, has dramatically demonstrated that high-technology companies, like the auto concerns and steelmakers before them, are not immune to the higher cost of American labor, especially assembly-line labor. These 1,700 employees at Atari assembled home computers and video games.

Israel accused the United States today of failing to honor an agreement on delineating military patrol zones in the Beirut area. An Israeli statement charged that all the incidents between United States marines and Israeli soldiers had occurred outside Marine areas, in zones designated as Israeli-controlled. (In Washington, a Pentagon official said Defense Minister Moshe Arens of Israel told Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger that Israeli forces in Lebanon were under ''strict instructions'' to avoid incidents with American marines. Page 3.)

People who have apartments with controlled or stabilized rents in New York City but have primary residences elsewhere should pay the full New York City income tax, Mayor Koch said yesterday. Either that, he said, or they should give up the ceiling on their rents. The proposal, which the Mayor disclosed unexpectedly at a breakfast meeting of the Association for a Better New York, has been under study by Kenneth Lipper, the Deputy Mayor for Finance.

Winnie Mandela, a black nationalist who is in a form of internal exile, has accepted a quilt signed by 26 members of the United States Congress opposed to South Africa's apartheid policies. Mrs. Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned African National Congress leader, was given the quilt Thursday as a replacement for a bedspread seized by the security police in January.

Lines are a way of life here. For rationed gasoline Sudanese drivers, who are allowed to fill their tanks only once a week, sometimes line up for as long as two days, sleeping in their automobiles. Not infrequently, a weary and unlucky customer will finally push his car to the pump only to be told that there is no more gasoline. ''Maalesh,'' a shrugging attendant will tell him, a fatalistic term used much in the Arab world when things go wrong. A rough colloquial rendering into English in this case is, ''What can you do?''

King Hussein of Jordan led an Arab League delegation to Britain today to ask Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Government for help in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In formal remarks after his arrival here, the King gave no sign that he was ready to follow up on his suggestion last fall that he looked favorably on the Reagan plan for a Palestinian state in the West Bank in confederation with Jordan.

The police seized a ton and a half of hashish that was bound for Sweden and arrested five men, the authorities said today.