What was going on when I was born?

JOHN UNITAS was 14 games from the end of his legendary career when he first met Dan Fouts. They became teammates on the San Diego Chargers within a few months of each other in 1973. The Chargers had bought Unitas's contract from the Baltimore Colts in January and taken Fouts in the third-round of the college draft a few months later. The Chargers opened that season with a soon-to-be Hall of Famer as the starter and a rookie as his backup. As diverse as their backgrounds and experience were - one, an 18-year veteran, the other an unpolished rookie from the University of Oregon - they liked each other right away and, in time, learned that they shared an approach and dedication to the game.

Ground will be broken this month for an opulent high-rise condominum in a former stone quarry directly across the street from the entrance to South Mountain Reservation State Park in South Orange, N.J. The development will be called Cambridge House and it will be built by the First Regency Development Corporation, a company that has built primarily in Florida. A spokesman for First Regency said the developers hoped to attract buyers looking for the space of a house with the convenience of apartment living.

THE downing of the South Korean airliner that strayed into Soviet airspace last week sent angry shock waves around the world. President Reagan called it ''a terrorist attack.'' He questioned ''Soviet credibility when they so flagrantly lie.'' ''The Soviet Union,'' Mr. Reagan insisted, ''owes the world the fullest possible explanation and apology for their inexcusable act of brutality.'' Korea demanded full compensation and there were stern denunciations in other world capitals, from NATO allies to Communist China and also from Communist Party officials in France and Italy.

Israeli tanks and military vehicles by the hundreds streamed southward early this morning as Israel began its long-awaited withdrawal from positions near Beirut. The long convoy rumbled south along the dusty highway during the night beneath brilliant flares shot into the sky, apparently fired by the Israelis to illuminate their route through the Shuf Mountains overlooking the capital. The announcement that the pullback to the Awali River was under way came in a telephone call shortly after midnight from an Israeli military spokesman, Maj. Louis Williams, at his office on the outskirts of Beirut. He did not give details, and declined to say how long the operation would take.

COMPETING for a declining pool of local students, Long Island colleges and universities are seeking to minimize their tuition increases, maximize their financial aid packages and step up out-of-state recruitment. While college costs nationwide, according to a study by the College Board, will rise about 10 percent this year, many Long Island schools are keeping their increases below that level. School officials say that while the Federal cutbacks projected last year did not reach the extent feared, government allocations nevertheless have not kept pace with the cost of a year at college, which, they said, grows faster than consumer prices or wage increases. With local high school enrollment declines expected to continue well into the 1990's, Long Island's demographics still appear unfavorable to institutions of higher learning. At Hofstra University in Hempstead, this year's freshman enrollment is 4 percent above last year, despite a 9 percent tuition increase. According to Marc Dion, dean of student services, aggressive recruitment of out-of-state students has broadened the university base. A quarter of the fall freshman class came from 24 states. (Four years ago, 17 percent of the first-year students came from out of state.)

GOLF communities, where an avid golfer can step out his front door and tee off down a rolling fairway, have spread across the Sun Belt in the last two decades and are now making strides in the Northeast, particularly in the New York metropolitan area. Developers have discovered that by placing homes around a new or old golf course they can give nearly half the houses premium frontage for which buyers are willing to pay premium prices. Old country clubs, many of which have fallen on hard economic times in recent years, have saved themselves from extinction by selling off part of their land for development into clusters of houses. And many towns are welcoming the golf communities as a means of retaining tracts of greenery and tree-lined horizons while adding ratables to their tax rolls. ''Over the last five years, some 125 new golf courses - nearly 60 percent of all new private courses being built in the United States - have been linked with recreational and retirement housing,'' said Harry Eckh off, director of golf-facility development for the National Golf Foundation in North Palm Beach, Fla.

The political message used to be the only medium in contemporary Chinese theater. During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, ideologues even dictated the plots and sent playwrights to research the details firsthand among the masses, who enjoyed final script approval. Those were the years when Ying Ruocheng and his fellow actors at Peking's People's Art Theater were planting rice down on the farm or making kites in the rehearsal halls for lack of anything more sensible to do. Following the death of Chairman Mao and the jailing of his widow Jiang Qing, a former Shanghai actress who dominated the radical clique now castigated as the so-called Gang of Four, Chinese theater has emerged from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution - though hardly from all political constraints. ''A few years ago, we were talking about the remnant fear in the heart of the artists,'' Mr. Ying said. ''They felt afraid. I think that's mostly gone.''

AFEW years ago, when interest rates were still at single-digit levels, few homeowners considered paying off a mortgage early. Income-tax deductions for the interest payments made the low cost of the loans even more affordable, and many homeowners anticipated that they would have to relocate long before the mortgage would be paid off. But today, with interest rates in the teens and more people staying put for longer periods, more financially sophisticated owners are beginning to question the wisdom of carrying a 30-year loan all the way to term. ''At 7 percent, nobody cared,'' said James Christian, chief economist at the U.S Leagues of Savings Institutions. ''But at 14 percent, there can be a big difference if you pay off early.''

ALBANY ON the map in Andrew Cuomo's office here, Westchester County is represented by two bold numbers. The first, drawn in green, shows that Westchester ranked second among New York's 62 counties in producing favorable ballots when the state's electorate narrowly approved a transporation bond issue in 1979. The second figure, in red, indicates that the county also registered fourth in opposition votes. Crouching down in front of the map to find Nassau County, which delivered more ''yes'' votes than any other, and Suffolk, which ranked third, Andrew Cuomo put Long Island and Westchester together and said, ''that's the ball game.''

Marian Horosko is an associate editor of Dance magazine.''Iwant them to get the bug for movement,'' said Rudolf Nureyev, announcing his primary goal as director of the Paris Opera Ballet, a post he assumes Tuesday and for which he has a three- year contract. ''I want to force-feed a new vocabulary into one that is depleted.'' Mr. Nureyev followed the word, ''force-feed'' with a dimpled grin as if he, the feeder, would be stuffing sweet, ripe strawberries into every dancer's mouth. ''It will include both modern and more up-to-date ballet vocabulary,'' he explained, ''and we will stage new choreography, some of it my own. Experimental works would not be right on such a large stage, but there will be modern choreography, to be sure.''

MEXICO CITY Politeness has a low priority on most movie sets. Together, David Lynch and Rafaella De Laurentiis comprise the rarest of combinations - a director and a producer who both have good manners. Good manners may be all that saves ''Dune'' from falling apart. ''Mastodon'' is Rafaella De Laurentiis's word for the movie she is producing from Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel. The statistics and logistics could describe a war rather than a movie. There are 53 speaking roles, 20,000 extras, four separate planets to be created, nearly 70 sets to be built and torn down, 900 men and women who have worked on the crew at one time or another during the last year. Two hundred of those men spent two months crawling on their hands and knees over three square miles of desert to clear it of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and every inch of cactus. Nothing grows or lives on the surface of the deep deserts of the planet Arrakis, the Dune of Mr. Herbert's intricate novel about a new Messiah.

Travelers throughout the Northeast have been known to make detours to stop at the award-winning restaurant in the Copper Beech Inn in Ivoryton, Conn., which was bought and restored in the early 1970's by Jo and Robert McKenzie. The couple ran the small hotel and restaurant until 1981, when they sold the business.