What was going on when I was born?

A Manhattan art dealer was indicted yesterday on charges that he had directed a $700,000 swindle involving at least four prominent art galleries and the selling and reselling of works by Degas, Matisse and Seurat. The dealer, Dennis R. Anderson, who is the author of three art books and a former museum curator, sold five works of art that he did not own, according to the indictment by a grand jury in State Supreme Court. An additional work is missing. Since his arrest late last month, a legal defense fund has raised more than $15,000.

The Gulf Corporation might still be independent today if it had invited T. Boone Pickens to lunch. But to put it kindly, Wall Street's tight little community - lawyers, investment bankers, arbitragers and institutional investors - is positively overjoyed that Gulf is being taken over by the Standard Oil Company of California. The seeds of Wall Street's distaste for Gulf were planted two years ago when the company made a deal to buy the Cities Service Company and then backed out when the Federal Trade Commission raised antitrust objections. Wall Street professionals, several of whom sustained heavy losses in that incident, felt certain that Gulf backed down without even trying to negotiate an antitrust settlement because it had bid far more for Cities Service than it should have.

A number of prominent trustees of New York City's enormous pension system are seeking to reduce investments in American companies that do business in South Africa. They argue that some kind of divestiture is morally compelling and fiscally sound. Their proposals, which would need approval from the boards of the five funds in the system to be adopted, are not yet on the table. But the thinking behind them, and the arguments against them, are likely to frame the debate here over the use of public funds for social causes. Support for a limited investment boycott comes from both city officials and labor leaders, the two groups that make up a majority of board members and that have the greatest economic stake in pension investment policies.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7, 1984 Companies Lilco will suspend dividends and cut its work force nearly 20 percent this year, the Long Island utility announced. These and other measures, including pay cuts, are intended to conserve $374 million in cash this year and save the company from insolvency, the new chairman said. The problems have been caused by cost overruns at Lilco's Shoreham nuclear power plant, where completion has been stymied by technical and political setbacks. (Page A1.) The Gulf-Socal pact renewed talk in Congress about curbs on such takeovers. The possibility that legislators or regulators may block Socal's planned $13.2 billion takeover of Gulf unnerved the stock market, where oil shares tumbled. (D1.) There are few on Wall Street who are unhappy that Gulf has lost its independence. Traders say Gulf had many chances to deflect the unwelcome wooing by T. Boone Pickens. (D1.) Banks around the world began signing up to participate in a $14 billion credit for Socal. (D23.) As Socal's investment adviser in the Gulf deal, Morgan Stanley scored an important coup in the oil company merger sweepstakes. (D23.)

An article in Business Day on Feb. 23 about marketing to elderly consumers incorrectly located the offices of Senior Citizens Unlimited, a direct mail marketing agency. They are in Tuckahoe, N.Y.

Brian Elias and Alex Yost went to Broadway yesterday ready to be discovered. But before their auditions at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, the two 9-year-olds wrestled on the blue carpet and took turns rolling down the steps from the mezzanine, where boys in all shapes and sizes waited to try out for ''Oliver!'' A revival of the British musical based on ''Oliver Twist'' is scheduled to open April 29 at the Mark Hellinger Theater. Responding to published notices inviting boys from 9 to 13, more than 130 were on hand from Philadelphia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and much of New York City - all eager for acceptance as promising young Cockney pickpockets or the upper- class orphan hero.

The Long Island Lighting Company will stop paying dividends on its common stock for at least the rest of the year and will reduce its work force by nearly 20 percent, the new chairman of the company announced today. The chairman, Dr. William J. Catacosinos, said the utility would also cut the salaries of all managers and about 20 percent of its lower-level employees. In addition, it will reduce directors' fees. The utility traces its mounting financial problems to the cost overruns on the 809-megawatt Shoreham nuclear power plant. At a current estimated cost of $4.1 billion, the plant is 15 times over the original estimate.

President Reagan, portraying the 1970's as a time of rampant pornography, drug abuse and sexual promiscuity, told an evangelical audience in Ohio yesterday that with his Administration ''Americans are turning back to God.'' ''In recent years, we must admit, America did seem to lose her religious and moral bearings,'' Mr. Reagan declared in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Columbus. Denouncing ''liberal attitudes'' and an array of purported problems ranging from Governmental disarray to sexual license, Mr. Reagan pointedly described the turning point as coinciding with the 1980 Presidential election. ''The Almighty who gave us this great land also gave us free will - the power under God to choose our own Senate Republicans tried to rally support for a compromise school prayer amendment. Page A11.

Gary Hart scored his third victory in a week today in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, with a 3 1/2-to-1 margin over Walter F. Mondale in Vermont's preference vote. The triumph, though it involved no delegates to the national convention, gave the Colorado Senator a clean sweep of three New England states - New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont - and positioned him favorably for a crucial test, the primaries and caucuses in nine states next Tuesday. The Rev. Jesse Jackson finished third, but by getting less than 10 percent of the vote he is threatened with a cutoff of Federal campaign funds. Reubin Askew, the former Governor of Florida, was also on the ballot, but he had withdrawn from the race.

The Reagan Administration, in a relaxation of East-West trade restraints, has approved the sale of $40 million worth of submersible drilling pumps to the Soviet Union on the ground that the equipment is available from other industrial countries, trade officials said today. The approval, granted without publicity late last month, was the first application of a decision that the officials said President Reagan made in December to permit exports of goods that the Russians can buy elsewhere. Approval of export licenses for the submersible pumps, which are used in offshore oil drilling, came after the United States failed in an effort in mid-January to get members of the 15-nation Coordinating Committee on allied strategic controls, known as Cocom, to add the pumps to its embargo list. Cocom, which meets periodically in Paris to coordinate allied trade policy with the Soviet Union, China and other Communist countries, is made up of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, except Spain and Iceland, plus Japan.

The $13.2 billion agreement under which the Standard Oil Company of California is to buy the Gulf Corporation touched off fresh Congressional efforts today to curb or prohibit such combinations. ''It is our intention to stop them dead in their tracks - Pickens, Socal, everybody,'' J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, declared in an interview. ''It seems to me decidedly not in the public interest to use up the nation's credit to create windfall profits and thereby divert funds from more useful endeavors such as drilling for more oil.'' Investors reacted with concern to the moves to restrict oil mergers.

The first open split in Syria since President Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970 was reported by Reagan Administration officials. They said that members of the ruling elite in Damascus were deeply divided over the choice of a successor to the President. (Page A1, Column 1.) George P. Shultz was irritated after hearing most members of a key House committee threaten to curtail aid to El Salvador. The Secretary of State told the Representatives they wanted to ''walk away'' from a vital area of the world ''because there are problems.'' (A1:1-2.)