What was going on when I was born?

The Scott Paper Company's decision last week to sell three profitable assets - its foam division, its Brown Jordan furniture division and 240,000 acres of Northwest timberland - was viewed by some as mainly an attempt to frustrate Scott's major shareholder, Brascan Ltd., which has said it wants to increase its stake in Scott. But the move was also rooted in perhaps Scott's most bruising marketing battle to date, a fight, more than a decade ago, with its chief rival, the Procter & Gamble Company, and others, for a bigger share of the paper towel, toilet paper and tissue markets. Scott is the world's largest producer of what the industry calls personal paper products. And it is still fiercely competitive with P. & G., since both hold roughly a 25 percent share of the national toilet paper and paper towel market. In facial tissues, however, it has about 10 percent of the market, compared with nearly 50 percent for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which makes Kleenex.

MilitaryAnalysis Despite assurances from their governments that the Marines and other members of the four-nation peacekeeping force in Beirut will remain on the defensive, American and other allied officers are confident that the troops jointly have the weapons, the training and the experience to mount an attack, if they were ordered, against the Shiite Moslem guerrillas who have shelled their positions and sniped at their transport. Troops of all four contingents came under fire yesterday, and United States and British sources said there was little chance that the Lebanese Army would be able to find and destroy the Shiite guerrillas in the hills. The retention of the peacekeeping force in its present defense positions under fire and without being able to do much about it, one source said, is bound to raise morale problems among the troops. The marines, who number 1,200, do not appear to have sufficient strength to mount offensive actions on their own. Aside from their helicopter gunships and 155-millimeter artillery, which were used Monday and Tuesday against Shiite positions, they have a limited ability to hit back at mortar batteries, machine-gun nests and snipers. The other units in the multinational force do not have heavy weapons.

THERE is a lot of surplus wine in California these days, and it's turning up in inexpensive blends marketed as simple table wines. There are dozens of these new, low-priced bargains around, and they constitute some of the best values on the market in years. Both reds and whites, they offer some very good drinking for $5 a bottle or less. Sometimes these wines are called generics. This is to distinguish them from the top-level wines that are called varietals because they are made entirely or mostly from a single variety of grape. A cabernet sauvignon, for example, is still considered a varietal even though it contains as much as 25 percent of wine from other kinds of grapes. Any more and it's considered a generic. Many of these enjoyable generics, or blends, have yet to make it east. But there are enough of them around to provide an interesting sampling. Among reds worth seeking out are Clos du Bois, Carneros Creek Red Table Wine, Clos du Val Red Table Wine, Beaulieu Vineyards Burgundy, Monterey Vineyards Classic Red, Trefethen Vineyards Eshcol Red, Glen Ellen Winery Proprietor's Reserve Red, Franciscan Vineyards Cask 320 Burgundy, Fetzer Vineyards Premium Red, Daniele Napa Valley Red, Bandiera Red and Joseph Phelps California Vin Rouge.

A foot-long stainless-steel carving knife is kept in the top drawer of a beat- up dresser in Room 832. Elizabeth Jackson, 21 years old, put it there. ''You've got to have a weapon,'' she said. ''A lot of people have knives in this hotel. Bigger knives, too. You need protection. You need protection bad.'' Miss Jackson, the mother of two young children, has lived in the Latham Hotel on East 28th Street since last month, when her family was evicted from its Brooklyn apartment.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said yesterday that it had begun its first major drive against organized crime in the New York City area and that it expected indictments soon of about 150 suspected crime leaders. Thomas L. Sheer, special agent in charge of the F.B.I's criminal division in New York, and other agency officials said in interviews that the bureau had deployed 165 agents in the last year to investigate and infiltrate the ''five families,'' the oldest and most powerful crime groups in the New York City area. ''Our main focus is the hierarchy of the five families, and these indictments will be significant and in large numbers,'' Mr. Sheer said. ''We are not going after fringe players. We are going to make a hell of a dent this fall and winter in the five families.''

Moslem militiamen attacked Lebanese Army positions and members of the multinational peacekeeping force as gunbattles raged for a third successive day throughout West Beirut. Three French soldiers were killed and four were wounded. American marines were attacked at all three of the positions they hold near Beirut International Airport. West Beirut resounded with a continuous crackling of automatic-weapons fire and the explosions of rockets and grenades. (Page A1, Column 6.) The intensified attacks on marine positions caught Reagan Administration officials by surprise, they said, adding that the assaults raised new questions about the role of American forces in Lebanon. (A1:4-5.)

The space shuttle Challenger, lifting off at night in a brilliant spectacle of sight and sound, carried five American astronauts into earth orbit early today. There they began a busy schedule, including the first tests of a $100 million data relay satellite that malfunctioned earlier this year. Despite intermittent problems with antennas and ground equipment, the preliminary tests of the improved communications link with the shuttle were described by flight controllers as ''very successful.'' After a sleep period that began at midafternoon, Houston time, the astronauts were awakened at 9:30 P.M. by a recording of the fight song for Georgia Tech, the alma mater of the flight commander, Capt. Richard H. Truly. They prepared for their second busy day in space, with a flight plan calling for them to deploy a communications and weather satellite for India at 3:49 A.M. Wednesday. The satellite, called Insat-1B, is regarded by the Indian Government as critical to research and technological development.

Because of reporting and editing errors, an obituary of Donald V. MacDonald on Aug. 4 contained a number of inaccuracies. A corrective article appears on page B5.

Orders to factories fell 1.7 percent in July, only the second decline since they hit a low during the recession last October, the Commerce Department said today. The decline, which followed a 5.1 percent surge in June, reflected a falloff in durable goods. Orders for these ''big ticket'' items fell 3.5 percent, after climbing 7.6 percent in June and 1.6 percent in May, the department added.

The amount of hazardous waste being generated in the United States is nearly four times higher than previously estimated, officials of the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed today. According to preliminary findings of an agency survey, 150 million metric tons of hazardous waste, including toxic chemicals, solvents, corrosive agents and other materials regulated by the agency, were generated across the country in 1981. Previously, without benefit of the information now supplied by waste producers and handlers, the agency had put the national total at 40 million tons. John Skinner, director of the agency's office of solid waste, said, ''We do not see any cause for alarm'' in the findings and added that there was no evidence ''that we are about to be overwhelmed by these large quantities of waste.'' He said the findings suggested that most of the waste was being properly managed.

Fierce gunbattles continued for the third day Tuesday throughout the streets of West Beirut as leftist Moslem militiamen attacked Lebanese Army positions and members of the multinational peacekeeping forces. Three soldiers in the French contingent of the multinational force and a paramilitary policeman were killed and four French soldiers were wounded in two incidents. The fatalities were the first suffered by the French in combat since the peacekeeping force came to Lebanon a year ago. One French soldier died when the unarmed water truck he was in was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade Tuesday morning, a spokesman for the French forces said. Later two other soldiers and the policeman died when the French Embassy compound was hit by rockets.

A tentative plan to reorganize the insurance subsidiaries of the Baldwin United Corporation would force annuity holders to accept a smaller return on their investment, sources said yesterday. Under the plan, formulated by state insurance regulators in response to the subsidiaries' financial problems, annuity holders would have to choose among eight options that generally offer either a slowed return of their money or sharply lower interest rates for at least three years. Details were provided by an insurance commissioner from an Eastern state who attended one of the four meetings held around the country Monday and yesterday for insurance regulators from every state. They were corroborated by a source close to the drafting of the reorganization plan.