What was going on when I was born?

Because of an editing error, a Washington dispatch yesterday on aid for El Salvador omitted several words from remarks President Reagan made during a visit to an elementary school and added one. In answering a child's question on what Mr. Reagan does at the White House, the President replied, ''There are a lot of people who have been asking that.''

MONTAUK, L.I. THE weather was shivering cold. Gulls were swooping low over the stern. The fishing boat Donna Lee was under way well offshore, and the nets in its wake were dragging the bottom of Long Island Sound. The Montauk light was a beckoning beacon ahead. All of a sudden the dragger, as the Donna Lee is known, slowed and the midship winches were set in grinding motion. Moments later the nets were reeled aboard, and momentarily the boat's deck was awash with a teeming, writhing, flopping mass of fish and shellfish. With great precision, the deckhands sorted out the haul. Using their hands and grappling hooks they selected 1 fish for the market and tossed 2 back into the water; take 2, toss 10; take 3, toss a dozen. The ''takes'' commonly turn up on restaurant and home tables - sole, flounder, sea scallops, bluefish, but terfish and fluke. Those tossed back were what the Donna Lee's skipper, a 31-year- old German-born fisherman named Bill Grimm, called ''no sales,'' fish that are by and large rejected by the American public. These fish are, incredibly, referred to by seafood merchants and fishermen alike as ''trash.''

In the crucial primary battles between Gary Hart and Walter F. Mondale yesterday, the election returns followed the pattern of the economy, state by state. Prosperity favored Senator Hart and adversity Mr. Mondale. The former Vice President, wounded by a string of primary defeats in the past fortnight, won decisively in Alabama, a state with 12.3 percent unemployment and the largest share of voters complaining that their family financial fortunes were worse now than a year ago, according to The New York Times/CBS News Polls. Massachusetts, Florida and Rhode Island, the three primaries won solidly by Senator Hart, all show only about 6 percent unemployment, below the national average. With the economy a less acute concern in Massachusetts, the poll there found many more people saying they were better off than worse off economically, and more people cited the nuclear arms race than any single economic issue as the most decisive issue in their vote. That worked in Mr. Hart's favor.

An article in Sports Pages yesterday about Temple University incorrectly cited the last year its basketball team qualified for the N.C.A.A.'s championship tournament. It was 1979.

''The church is not turning back.'' - Bishop Jan Mazur of Siedlce, Poland.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 1984 The Economy The 0.2 percent drop in retail sales in February was not entirely unexpected, given the sharp rise in January of 3.3 percent, the largest since May 1975. The economy continues strong, analysts said, although they warned that purchases of more expensive items such as cars and appliances could slow if interest rates rise. (Page D1.) Unwelcome corporate takeovers would be curbed under a bill to be proposed by Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. But mergers would be helped by the S.E.C., which wants regulatory and legislative changes that would facilitate such acquisitions. (D1.)

Retail sales slipped by two-tenths of 1 percent in February from January but remained well ahead of the sales pace of a year earlier, the Commerce Department reported today. Analysts said that the drop was not unexpected, given a revision in the January increase, from 2.2 percent to 3.3 percent, the largest rise since May 1975. The Administration said that the February drop was no signal that the nation's economic recovery was running out of steam, noting that the $106 billion in sales was still 16.3 percent above February 1983. ''We started the year with a surge,'' said Larry Speakes, President Reagan's spokesman. ''Retail sales are staying at a remarkably high level.''

The chairman of the Mesa Petroleum Company, T. Boone Pickens, has acquired a reputation he says he does not like. ''I'm getting sick of people calling me a corporate gunslinger,'' Mr. Pickens said in an interview at Mesa's offices here. ''I wish they would take a better look at what I've been saying, and what Mesa has been doing, for a long time.'' In fact, in an industry dominated by much larger companies spending all they can afford on exploring for new oil and gas reserves, Mr. Pickens and his little Amarillo company have been acting peculiarly for years. Long before organizing the investment group that acquired 13 percent of the shares of the Gulf Corporation - a group that stands to make more than $700 million on the $80-a-share Gulf takeover offer from the Standard Oil Company of California - Mr. Pickens had been advocating changes in the way oil companies are run.

Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said today that he would propose legislation to curb hostile corporate takeovers. The Securities and Exchange Commission, however, began moving in the opposite direction by endorsing regulatory and legislative changes that would restrain a target company's efforts to repel takeovers. In February 1983, the commission appointed an advisory committee to examine regulations governing tender offers. It submitted a list of 50 changes last July, but the commission itself did not take a position on them until today, just three weeks before the commissioners are scheduled to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on the report.

Leaders of many of the nation's major nonprofit theaters, faced with continuing financial problems, say they are making artistic compromises to remain solvent. This retrenchment affects an informal network of theaters that has produced virtually all the major American dramas and many musicals for the last decade. The picture of theaters limiting the size and scope of their seasons has emerged from three sources: interviews with leaders of noncommercial theater around the country, a report to be presented to Congress later this month by the National Endowment for the Arts and a new survey of the fiscal condition of nonprofit theaters by the Theater Communications Group, a New York-based umbrella group for such theaters. ''The field's general artistic vitality is showing signs of erosion due to economic and institutional pressures,'' the National Endowment report said in a chapter that is part of the 500-page, five-year plan. Financial survival, the Endowment said, has come at the cost of an ''artistic deficit.''

The Federal official who regulates savings and loan associations, under widespread attack for a proposal to restrict the placement of deposits by money brokers, has privately told members of Congress that the thrift industry is in worse financial condition than is generally realized. Edwin J. Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, has warned that three dozen thrift institutions, including some large ones, are in danger of failing, according to Congressional aides and officials at other regulatory agencies. Mr. Gray, whose proposed regulation is opposed by the Treasury and Justice Departments and large parts of the financial sector, has argued that payouts to savings and loan depositors by the Federal deposit insurance fund could run well over $1 billion unless the Government cracks down on the deposit brokers. The corporation has some $6.3 billion of reserves and by law can borrow more from the Treasury.

The Senate Intelligence Committee today approved President Reagan's proposal for more aid for Nicaraguan rebels. The action, taken without dissent at a closed meeting, set the stage for an expected clash over emergency military assistance for Central America. The Nicaragua proposal is for $21 million, and $93 million more in military aid is being sought for El Salvador. Both measures are to be taken up Wednesday by the Appropriations Committee, according to Senate officials. They said the requests would probably be offered as amendments to an African drought-aid bill.