What was going on when I was born?

The Environmental Protection Agency, after a 10-year fight over the issue, today banned most agricultural uses of ethylene dibromide, a chemical known to cause cancer. It is used both as a pesticide and a gasoline additive. Meanwhile, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration withdrew a standard that it announced only Thursday for protecting workers from the dangerous substance. The environmental agency's action is intended to halt the increasing contamination of food and underground water supplies in Florida, California and other agricultural states where the pesticide is most commonly used. The safety and health agency standard would have set maximum levels of the substance to which workers could be legally exposed.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz failed yesterday to persuade Syria's Foreign Minister to drop his Government's refusal to agree to United Nations observers to police the cease-fire in Lebanon, a senior State Department official said. Expressing some frustration over Syria's position, not only on the United Nations truce observers but also on its rejection of Lebanon's request that it agree to terms for withdrawing its troops from that country, the official told reporters at a briefing that the Syrians ''have been very difficult for us to get along with.'' ''We have had lots of contact with them, we've had many points of difference,'' he said. ''There's no question of the fact that their views differ from ours on many important respects.''

Investors did not have to look much past takeover targets to find the stock market stars of the third quarter. Market strength or industry fundamentals played second fiddle to the bidding wars. That contrasted with the first two quarters of the year, when the surging market carried any number of issues to new heights. This third-quarter phenomenon was particularly visible on the New York Stock Exchange. Its two largest percentage gainers were the Northwest Energy Company and Harris Bankcorp Inc., both sought by other companies.

In another step toward the total deregulation of the banking industry, Federal regulators decided today to make two high-interest types of accounts more accessible to depositors. The ruling covers money for Keogh plans and Individual Retirement Accounts, on which taxes are deferred until the funds are withdrawn, usually at retirement. At that point, the taxes payable will be lower. The regulators removed, as of Dec. 1, the $2,500 minimum investment in so-called Super NOW accounts and money market accounts. These accounts, on which there are no interest rate ceilings, had not been available to those investing in I.R.A.'s because most salaried employees may not put more than $2,000 a year in those accounts.

New York City was awarded nearly $25 million by the Federal Government today for 10 urban development projects in the five boroughs. The projects range from $15 million for the construction of a shopping and office plaza on East Fordham Road in the Bronx to $428,000 for the renovation of Town Hall on West 43d Street. It was the largest amount the city ever received at one time for such redevelopment, city officials said. New Jersey Gets $19 Million In Trenton, Governor Kean announced that seven New Jersey cities and one county had beeen awarded $19 million for urban development projects. The grants range from $5.5 million for the construction of an apartment complex in New Brunswick to $142,000 for a citywide commercial revitalization project in Vineland. ''These grants will provide badly needed jobs and a great infusion of economic strength to some of our most important urban areas,'' Governor Kean said.

The international pilots' union called yesterday for an early suspension, starting Monday, of the boycott on flights to Moscow it imposed in retaliation for the downing of a Korean Air Lines jet by a Soviet fighter. Officials of the union, which includes Soviet pilots, said they were encouraged by indications the Russians were willing to cooperate in improving procedures for intercepting off-course aircraft and preventing a repetition of the tragedy in which 269 people died. Capt. Robert Tweedy, an Aer Lingus pilot who heads the 60,000-member group, said, ''It's almost a certainty that flights will resume.'' The officers' decision is a recommendation to member groups.

The Government's principal gauge for forecasting the economy's short-term prospects turned downward last month for the first time in more than a year, the Commerce Department reported today. But economists and the Reagan Administration saw little cause for concern. The gauge, the index of leading economic indicators, dipped one-tenth of 1 percent in August from July, after increases of 1 percent or more from December through June. For July, the Commerce Department today revised the gain reported last month to eight-tenths of 1 percent from three-tenths.

Statutory authority for the United States Commission on Civil Rights is expiring, with Congress and the White House at a standoff in their effort to reach a compromise on the future of the agency and President Reagan's three nominees. ''They are in a real deadlock,'' said Linda Chavez, the new staff director of the commission, who was appointed by Mr. Reagan. The Senate Judiciary Committee was to have voted today on confirmation of the nominees and on a bill to extend the life of the commission beyond 12:01 A.M. Saturday. But committee members postponed the issue until next week to allow more time for negotiations with the White House.

The Chief Justice of the Philippines resigned today as head of the presidential commission of inquiry into the murder of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. President Ferdinand E. Marcos named Arturo Tolentino, a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, to replace Chief Justice Enrique Fernando as chairman of the commission, which has been stalled since Sept. 12 by opposition lawsuits. The suits questioned the Chief Justice's impartiality to head the commission because of his close ties to Mr. Marcos. Mr. Fernando said today that he had resigned in part because the court challenges had delayed the commission's investigation.

You can still go to the old places here - those saloons with their separate gentlemen's and ladies' entrances, where the endless glasses of draft beer come in even numbers. ''Each drinker is an island unto himself,'' said a patron of the Wheatsheaf, founded in 1849 and Toronto's oldest bar. ''Ontario may be the Scotland that was.'' There is also the Elm Grove Tavern, where the locals remember a man walking in six or seven years ago, shooting a customer and then strolling to another bar across the street to order a beer and wait for the police. Or the Edgewater, which a regular calls ''the last bastion of the bouffant'' and where old men in tuques timelessly chew on tobacco and the world's problems. Or the Winchester, where a makeshift country band sometimes forgets the words.

The Soviet Union, a week before its next round of talks with China, has called for improved relations between the two countries and congratulated the Chinese people on the 34th anniversary of Communist rule. The Soviet press agency Tass carried a telegram to the Chinese Government from the Soviet Parliament and Council of Ministers that said, ''Positive development of Soviet-Chinese relations would be in the interests of the two countries, would promote a solution to long-term economic tasks facing them, and would be of benefit to the entire international situation as well.''

One man was killed and 26 people were injured today when a bomb destroyed the American, Soviet and Algerian pavilions at an international trade fair in Marseilles. An Armenian guerrilla group that calls itself Orly, believed by the police be a faction of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, took responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to the police. Interior Minister Gaston Defferre, who is also the Mayor of Marseilles, said later that the far rightist Charles Martel Group had also taken responsibility for the blast.