What was going on when I was born?

Thomas E. Bolger, an executive vice president and one of A.T.& T.'s nine top executives, could certainly have stayed on when Ma Bell is broken up on Jan. 1. Instead, he specifically chose to run the Bell Atlantic Corporation, which looks to be one of the stronger regional holding companies being spun off. ''The regionals have an opportunity that is fantastic,'' said Mr. Bolger, chairman and chief executive office of Atlantic Bell, in an interview at the company's headquarters here. ''In just my little region, we have 10 million residential phone lines,'' he continued. ''Right now we largely transfer only voices. But if the information age is as real as competent sociologists tell us, and you start imagining the transfers of data by all these people, the business could be immense.''

After a second patient had become infected by an airborne fungus and had died in a new bone marrow transplant unit at a state cancer hospital here, hospital officials asked the state to install special air filtration systems in each of the unit's six rooms. But the request became stalled in the state's Office of General Services. In the next 8 months, 9 more patients out of 29 in the special unit also became infected with the fungus and died, according to interviews with hospital officials and an examination of documents at the hospital and the State Department of Health. After the 11th death last April 2, officials of the hospital, Roswell Park Memorial Institute, closed the unit - a wing of the building - until the new air filtration systems could be installed. The wing remains closed, and the state has just begun to examine what caused the outbreak, the effectiveness of the hospital's response and the operation of the wing's aging ventilation system.

With hostilities on this Caribbean island apparently at an end, United States military officials made it clear today that the army's key role now was guarding checkpoints, patrolling the capital and making house-to-house and car checks for weapons. The officials said 2,300 paratroopers would leave shortly. They added that for the time being, the remaining 2,500 paratroopers of the 82d Airborne Division on Grenada would be deployed around the capital of St. George's as well as in northern parts of the island where snipers remain. ''There's still small, individual bands and elements there,'' Maj. Douglas Frey, public affairs officer for the Airborne Division, said at the Grenada Beach Hotel, a bomb-damaged resort where the military has set up headquarters.

The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution ''deploring'' the invasion. Page A21. WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - The Defense Department said tonight that ''hostilities have ceased'' in Grenada and that the withdrawal of the American troops on the island and the return home of the approximately 600 Cuban prisoners would begin shortly. In a two-sentence announcement, the department said that Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger ''has directed that U.S. forces begin a pullout within a few days.''

The Horse Shows listing in the Sports section on Sunday gave an incorrect telephone number for information on the National Horse Show. The number to call is (212) 736-6314.

For months, Carmen Iglesis has contemplated the closing of her business. She has talked about it without any visible anger or sadness, but with a certain small smile and a shrug that seemed to say simply - it was out of her hands. Her lease was running out. The landlord did not want to renew it. ''What can I do?'' she said.

New factory orders rose 1.5 percent in September, the Government reported today. Shipment by the nation's factories of completed orders also rose, and so did inventories, the Commerce Department report added.

CONTEMPORARY couples grapple with a complex set of personal considerations when they tackle the decison to become parents. For Jewish couples, there is an additional imperative: their sense of obligation to halt the decline in population that demographers say poses a threat to the survival of Judaism in this country. Two conferences designed to confront this issue were scheduled for this week. Representatives of 28 major Jewish groups, including the rabbinical associations for the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist branches of the faith, along with such diverse groups as B'nai B'rith International, Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress and the Women's Branch of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, met at the offices of the American Jewish Committee in Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday. Their meeting, entitled the National Conference on Jewish Population Growth, produced a list of actions that the participants concluded might be undertaken.

Seven years ago this town's largest employer, a plant that made television sets for Sears, Roebuck & Company, was foundering. Ten percent of the sets failed inspection at the plant and had to be repaired before being sold. Customer complaints were high. Employment dropped from 2,200 jobs to fewer than 500. The company was near bankruptcy. Today, under new, Japanese management, employment at the plant is back at 2,000 and additional hiring is possible. Productivity has risen substantially and the quality of the television sets and microwave ovens produced is excellent, Sears says, and workers' grievances have been halved.

Quotation of the Day ''Traces of bigotry still mar America. So each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the commandments he believed in and sought to live every day.

Chock Full o'Nuts said yesterday that it had reached an agreement to buy, for $12 million, a majority of the stock held by a dissident group of shareholders that had been battling for control of the big coffee producer and restaurant chain. Under the agreement, Chock Full o'Nuts management will pay $20 a share for 600,000 shares held by the dissidents. They have been led by Jerry Finkelstein, the financier, during more than a year of proxy battles to elect their followers to the board and change the Chock Full o'Nuts management. The purchase will reduce the Finkelstein group's 21.4 percent stake to about 400,000 shares, or less than 10 percent of the company's 5,037,000 outstanding shares. Only two months ago, Mr. Finkelstein and his associates had increased their holdings by 90,000 shares, indicating to analysts a determination to press the proxy fight.

Beginning next summer, one-third of New York City's buses will be cooled by a method the Transit Authority abandoned years ago: open windows. The authority announced yesterday that it was ending its effort to keep the air-conditioning units on 1,400 of its older-model buses in working order and would ask passengers simply to open the windows. Maintenance efforts will be concentrated on keeping the remaining 2,337 newer-model buses cool. Howard H. Roberts, the head of the Transit Authority's bus division, said the decision on air-conditioning would not affect plans to keep all the buses heated in the coming winter months. ''The systems are entirely separate,'' he said.