What was going on when I was born?

The Rath Packing Company, an employee-owned meatpacker hailed as a leader in a new era of industrial democracy, filed yesterday for protection and reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Federal bankruptcy laws. In 1980, employees bought the company to try to keep it from failing. At noon yesterday, many of those same employees were told by Lyle Taylor, a former butcher and union leader who was elected president of Rath in March, that the company was seeking protection from its creditors.

The House of Representatives today rejected attempts to cut funds for the MX intercontinental missile and the B-1 strategic bomber. By a vote of 217 to 208, the House turned back an effort to delete funds for production of the missile. Earlier it voted, 247 to 175, against an attempt to bar financing of the new bomber for more than one year at a time. Both efforts were led by Representative Joseph P. Addabbo, Democrat of Queens, who is chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. They represented the fall-back positions of those whose initial efforts to kill the projects had been rejected by the House. Last July, the House approved production funds for the MX missile by a larger margin, 220 to 207.

There are leaflets, mailings, palm cards by the millions. There are whistle-stop tours, campaign promises, a flashy television advertisement and even a brass band or two. And by Election Day there will be just about everything needed for a political campaign - except a live candidate. It is all part of an effort that Governor Cuomo has put together on behalf of a ballot issue, Proposal 1, authorizing the state to borrow $1.25 billion for transportation projects through a bond sale.

GENERATIONS of children have held their noses and eaten their spinach or beets or whatever in order to get at the chocolate pudding with whipped cream or even the Lorna Doones. Later in life dreadful dinners of mystery meat and gray-green vegetables have been redeemed by buttery-crusted lemon chiffon pies, meringue cakes filled with mocha butter cream and the sweet-tart flavor of a fresh raspberry mousse that explodes on the tongue. Most Americans have a sweet tooth. Indeed, despite protestations to the contrary, we can probably still match our collective sweet tooth against any other nation's. We may get through an entire dinner without eating a roll or but ter and carefully scrape the beurre blanc off a poached fish, but when the dessert cart rolls by we happily surrender to chocolate mousse cake laced with Grand Marnier Recipes are on page C8.

With clipboards and large-scale maps, investigators for a lawyers' group are out walking the 13,000 miles of sidewalks in New York, using eight symbols to note every pothole, raised manhole cover and broken curb.. Behind them, scores of checkers hired by the City Department of Transportation will soon follow with their own maps and clipboards, verifying the lawyers' findings with another set of symbols. The map making, which has so far involved more than 3,000 charts and the marking and double-checking of 750,000 defects in three boroughs, is the latest phase in a sidewalk war being waged between the city, which says it has been losing millions of dollars in personal-injury suits, and the lawyers, who represent the injured, and whose own livelihoods are at stake. In the last few years, settlements and judgments against the city have been swelling, and officials say they are paying out more each year than the budget of either the Department of Health or the Department of Parks and Recreation. The suits against the city depend on what one lawyer calls an ''essential incongruity'' in the legal status of the sidewalks. For the most part, they are owned by the adjacent property owners, who are responsible for keeping them in good condition, but the legal liability for personal injuries if they are in poor condition rests with the city.

The city began releasing prisoners last night from its overcrowded jails. At least 341 are to be freed by the end of the week, under a Federal District Court order to reduce jail crowding. And the city said it might decide later in the week to release more than 341, perhaps many more. The city said it set several dozen inmates free last night after they posted 10 percent of their bail. All, it said, were men awaiting trial whose bail had been set at $1,500 or less.

The International Business Machines Corporation yesterday introduced its first computer designed specifically for use in the home, but said the $700 machine would not be available for the upcoming holiday buying season. Consumers will not be able to buy the long anticipated computer, called the PCjr (pronounced PC Junior), until early next year and it will be in limited supply even then, the company said. The delay is expected to slow holiday season computer sales in general because many consumers, already confused by a rapidly changing market, may delay their purchases until they can see and test the PCjr. The home computer industry has been characterized by severe price cutting, which helped lead to last week's announcement by the Texas Instruments Corporation that it was quitting the business. There is also a growing disenchantment among consumers who are finding that the machines, many of which carry base prices of $200 and less, can do little more than play games.

Rupert K. Murdoch, the Australian newspaper executive who owns newspapers ranging from The Times of London to The New York Post, announced yesterday that he had bought The Chicago Sun-Times for $90 million in cash. Mr. Murdoch purchased the tabloid, which is the nation's ninth-largest daily in terms of circulation, from Marshall Field 5th and his half-brother, Frederick. They are dissolving their family-owned company, Field Enterprises, to pursue separate interests. The sale includes The Sun- Times's property in downtown Chicago and the Field Newspaper Syndicate, which distributes comic strips (including Dennis the Menace, B.C. and Andy Capp), the Ann Landers advice column and the Erma Bombeck humor column, and the Independent Press Service. Mr. Murdoch walked through the offices of The Sun-Times yesterday, meeting employees and promising that he would not make drastic changes in the paper's news-gathering efforts. He is expected, however, to change its Democratic-oriented editorial views to his own more politically conservative position, a shift that he has made at other papers he bought.

THE sconces have been lighted, the coffee and cognac are on the table and the talk turns, as it often does around New York, to relationships - specifically, the marriage of Leopold and Molly Bloom. ''It took a long time to find out what his relationship with Molly really was, didn't it?'' said Kathryn Forman. ''I never did,'' Emy Nevin said. The group has gathered in Mrs. Forman's home in Sands Point, an affluent Long Island community near Port Washington, to discuss James Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' On other occasions the subject has been Plato's ''Republic'' or Goncharov's ''Oblomov'' or Dickens's ''David Copperfield.''

News Analysis DETROIT, Nov. 1 - American auto makers apparently are trying to build a case for permanent limits on imports of Japanese cars, a goal that clashes with the latest agreement to extend quotas for another year, until March 1985. Officials of the Ford Motor Company, the Chrysler Corporation and the American Motors Corporation complain that the relative weakness of the yen and the Japanese practice of forgiving taxes on exports give Japanese auto makers a permanent and ''unfair'' cost advantage. The one-year extension of import quotas just negotiated by the Japanese and American Governments, they say, is not sufficent help. Until recent months, the auto companies had been talking about a need for temporary restraints, while they retooled factories to build the small and fuel-efficient models needed to compete with Japanese cars. Now they are saying that restrictions on Japanese auto imports will be needed for years if the industry is to survive. Lee A. Iacocca, Chrysler's chairman, was the most outspoken today. Commenting on the agreement for import quotas of 1.85 million cars in the year starting next April 1, up from 1.68 million cars now, he said: ''Make no mistake, this 'transitional agreement' is a serious blow to the U.S. auto producers, suppliers, dealers, their employees and laid-off workers, who are being hurt by the unfair advantages enjoyed by the Japanese auto industry and whose problems were not corrected by these negotiations.''

''We are at a historical moment. People are tired of authoritarian governments.

In a broad, bipartisan display of agreement, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly today for legislation that would apply the War Powers Resolution to the fighting in Grenada. The legislation passed, 403 to 23, with 256 Democrats and 147 Republicans supporting the measure. The Reagan Administration was ''not happy'' with the legislation but did not actively oppose it, according to Representative William S. Broomfield of Michigan, ranking Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee. 'No Alternative' After the vote, Representative Clement J. Zablocki, Democrat of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, explained the outcome this way: ''There was no alternative. Members of Congress are reluctant to violate the law, even if the President seems to violate the law.''