What was going on when I was born?

Paul Deane's two shopping carts, tied end to end, bounced up and down along Boone Avenue in the South Bronx, his load of empty beer cans clanking with every pothole. Mr. Deane, a thin, bearded man who is 52 years old and unemployed, was headed for a recycling center that would pay him 21 cents a pound for his trove of aluminum cans. ''I pick up 40 or 50 bucks a week, more on the weekends if the weather holds and there are lots of ball games,'' he said. Last month, the recycling center - run by Bronx 2000, a nonprofit development corporation - paid out more than $20,000, largely to the unemployed who brought boxes and carts filled with aluminum cans.

Under the pressure of Jack Nicklaus's presence beside the 18th green, with Nicklaus waiting against the possibility of a one-stroke error that would force a tie, Hal Sutton made the par 4 he needed on the final hole today and won the 65th Professional Golfers' Association Championship by one shot. Until the leaders' last six holes, the final round of the championship had looked like a yawner with Sutton cruising on a five-stroke lead. Then Sutton bogeyed three holes in a row while Nicklaus and Peter Jacobsen were making runs at him. Sutton later said his thinking broke down - from aggressiveness, he switched unwittingly to conservatism.

The young boy's mother put one hand behind his head as her other hand guided a heaping forkful of limp, gray eggplant inexorably toward his mouth. He opened his mouth slightly only after closing his eyes, and gulped down the goo with an awful grimace. It may have been the longest night in his life, the night of the annual Vineland Eggplant Dinner, a harvest ritual feast that lasts for hours as one eggplant concoction after another is served - nine courses in all, from the buffalo soup with eggplant dumplings right through the eggplant cake. And eggplant wine, of course, to wash it down.

Competing for the first time for female students, both Barnard and Columbia College officials say they are pleased with the freshman classes they were able to attract for the fall. Barnard, which decided last year to remain a women's college while its male counterpart across the street became coeducational, recorded a drop in the number of its applicants. But Barnard officials say the freshman class is of about the same caliber as last year's. ''We are very pleased with the way things went,'' said Barnard's president, Ellen V. Futter. ''It's a very telling sign that indicates we have a strong appeal and a clientele of our own.''

The new farm trade agreements with the Soviet Union and China have improved prospects for United States agriculture exports, but American farmers are not cheering yet. True, the Soviet Union agreed to a new five-year grain agreement with the United States on July 28 that increases the minimum purchase by 50 percent. And China has returned to United States markets after the settlement of a textile trade dispute between the two countries, ending a boycott of American farm products that dragged on for most of this year. In addition, trade skirmishes with the European Economic Community that threatened to erupt into a full- scale agricultural trade war have just about ceased.

In the late 1970's many executives dressed for success, looked out for No. 1 and dismissed old-line self-improvement methods as declasse. In a sea of flashy image-building alternatives, however, the venerable Dale Carnegie course hewed to its basic teachings on how to win friends and influence people. And now, the company's executives say, their devotion to principle is paying off as never before. Executives of the corporation that Carnegie founded - Dale Carnegie & Associates - say enrollment is at a record this year. Indeed, they say, they expect to graduate their three-millionth student by December.

An article in Business Day July 21 reporting China's purchase of telephone equipment from a subsidiary of the ITT Corporation referred incorrectly to the United States position on the transfer of the technology involved. The United States had objected to the sale, but dropped the objection.

Grete Waitz of Norway won the most important marathon of her career today in the opening of the first world track and field championships, but Alberto Juantorena's gold-medal racing days may have been ended by a freakish finish-line injury. The 32-year-old Juantorena, a gold-medal winner at 400 and 800 meters in the 1976 Olympic Games at Montreal, fractured a bone in his right foot and tore two ligaments on the outside of the ankle during a heat of the 800-meter run. The lanky Cuban was carried off the track on a stretcher, distraught with pain and emotion, and was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where he underwent a two-and-a-half-hour operation. The injury occurred after Juantorena violated one of the basic principles of racing by glancing back six times in the last straightaway and slowing near the finish line, believing he had won the heat and qualified for the second round Monday.

Reagan Administration officials say Saturday's dispatch of two American Awacs surveillance planes and an escort of F-15 fighters to help Chad is aimed at countering what Washington perceives to be an effort by Libya to create its own sphere of influence across Africa. In geopolitical terms, officials say that Chad, which is an impoverished, landlocked desert nation with a population of 4.4 million people, is relatively unimportant to United States security interests. But as a testing ground, and potential base, for Libyan attempts to subvert other nations, including Egypt, the Sudan and Nigeria, the officials said Chad had become the focus of a Western effort to demonstrate to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, that attempts to expand his influence would be strenuously opposed. A senior Administration official said today: ''We view Libyan aggression in Chad as only the latest and most brazen example of a broader pattern of Libyan efforts to destabilize and subvert governments across a whole belt of states in Africa.''

Alon Goren, who will be 18 later this month, created his 40th video game recently, sitting at home in front of a computer screen. He has made about $20,000 this year - much of it this summer - selling his game programs to a computer software company. The company, Microvations Inc., was founded by a classmate from Great Neck South High School on Long Island, Evan Grossman. Mr. Grossman, who is already 18, has a good summer job, too: running the company. While many of their high school and college colleagues may be working for the minimum wage at fast-food restaurants or delivering groceries - if they can find a job at all - a handful of lucky and talented young people in the New York metropolitan area are getting paid, very well in some instances, for their knowledge of computers.

The economic recovery accelerated sharply in July, with a broad- based index of industrial expansion reaching its highest level in nearly 10 years, the National Association of Purchasing Managers said in its monthly report yesterday. The association, which surveys 250 industrial companies about their employment, new orders, inventories and other indicators of business activity, said ''every indicator was positive'' in July. At the same time, the association said a seasonally adjusted index of these indicators, reflecting overall industrial expansion, was higher last month than at any time since November 1973. The index registered 67.1 percent, compared with 59.6 percent in June. Any reading above 50 percent means the economy is expanding, according to the purchasing group.

DURING the United States team trials in whitewater canoeing last May, a group of the athletes were asked to submit $100 checks to confirm their hotel reservations for the world championships in Merano, Italy. When the team manager tried to cash the checks, however, a handful of the checks bounced. ''That's what happens when you're dealing with amateur athletes,'' said Abbie Endicott of Bethesda, Md., who has been instrumental in fund-raising for the national whitewater team. ''The paddlers were down to rock bottom even before they went to Europe. In whitewater, once you make a national team, you still have to get yourself to the world championships. In flatwater, which is an Olympic sport, they get their expenses paid.'' Defining an amateur athlete these days has become almost as confusing as the diverse eligibility rules that separate the various sports. For example, Rule 51 of the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the international governing body for track and field, states only that ''an amateur is one who abides by the eligibility rules of the I.A.A.F.''