What was going on when I was born?

The United States Football League intends to begin playing a fall schedule by 1987, putting it in direct competiton against the National Football League, according to two prominent U.S.F.L. executives. The sources said that after the current season, which concludes in July, the league would play two more ''spring'' seasons and then wait more than a year before resuming play in September 1987. Several months ago the league formed a committee to study, among other things, the feasibility of making such a change. ''It was an executive decision made by the people who control the league,'' one of the sources said, referring to the change to a fall schedule. ''It is the only logical way for this league to continue. There is virtually no chance that it's not going to happen.''

WEST HARTFORD IN 1946, when Rabbi William Cohen arrived in West Hartford after graduating from Yeshiva University in New York, few members of his congregation were over 40 years of age. Now, more than two-thirds of the approximately 250 families who are members of Beth David Synagogue are in their 60's. ''We used to have a lot of dances,'' he said. ''We don't anymore because older people are not that interested in going to a dance.'' The country's aged, according to the 1980 census, are increasing at a rate 10 times faster than that of any other segment of the population. Nowhere is that statistic more evident than in suburban communities, where many young couples moved to raise their families in the years following World War II.

Three years ago, Yeshiva University began to rethink the use of its extra space at 55 Fifth Avenue, a 19-story building at the corner of 12th Street where it operates the Brookdale Center of Cardoza Law School. Since the university wanted its law school to continue in that location, several options were taken under consideration, including the sale of the Greenwich Village property and an arrangement for a lease-back.

SLOW LEARNER Early Stories. By Thomas Pynchon. 193 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $14.95. IT'S always an occasion when the invisible man comes to dinner. Thomas Pynchon, like J. D. Salinger, is a writer who has been hiding away for years, and in ''Slow Learner'' he cautiously paints himself back into the public view. Indeed, he makes more of an appearance than he has ever done, since the volume not only collects five early works but offers an easygoing, seemingly vulnerable 20-page introduction by the vanishing author himself. Mr. Pynchon is hard on his old faults, and at first seems to find little virtue in what he calls his apprentice work. ''There are some mighty tiresome passages here,'' he warns. ''I was operating on the motto 'Make it literary,' a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.'' ''Do not,'' he adds later, ''underestimate the shallowness of my understanding.'' Four of these stories were written while Mr. Pynchon was a

WASHINGTON S OME senior officials had warned from the first that aiding the Nicaraguan rebels might backfire. Their fears, stated when the Administration was about to inaugurate the policy three years ago, seemed to be fulfilled last week as the United States role in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors came under attack from American allies and both parties in Congress. The ensuing controversy cast doubt on the President's ability to pursue his policies across the board in Central America, setting the scene for a major foreign policy debate in the Presidential campaign. As unease deepened, the Administration denied reports that United States military pilots had flown into combat in El Salvador and that the Pentagon had contingency plans for American combat forces in the region. Unable to persuade Congress to speed additional aid to El Salvador, President Reagan went ahead and used his emergency ''draw-down'' authority to assign $32 million for helicopters, ammunition, medical equipment and spare parts. The White House hoped Congress would authorize the money within 120 days. But the mood in Congress as it broke for Easter recess last week was not conciliatory and the financial end-run did not help. ''I think it's wrong, wrong, wrong,'' said Representative Clarence D. Long, the Maryland Democrat.

President Reagan said today that he had ordered $32 million in emergency arms shipments for El Salvador on Friday night because ''we cannot turn our backs on this crisis at our doorstep.'' He ordered the aid after Congress adjourned for a 10-day Easter recess without voting on whether to approve the money. In his first public comments since the furor in Congress in recent days over the Administration's policies toward El Salvador and Nicaragua, Mr. Reagan also leveled some of his sharpest criticism to date at Nicaragua for conducting what he called ''covert aggression'' against El Salvador and its other neighbors. Nicaraguan Harbors Mined Mr. Reagan, in his weekly, paid radio broadcast, did not refer directly to the American covert campaign against Nicaragua, which reportedly included the mining of Nicaraguan harbors by Nicaraguan rebels and Latin American agents under direction of the Central Intelligence Agency. But he indirectly upheld it by saying that given the Sandinista Government's ''record of repression, we should not wonder that the opposition, denied other means of expression, had taken up arms'' against the Nicaraguan leaders.

THIS Passover, as in many years past, several dozen of Yale University's Jewish students will forsake the regular dining halls for the basement of a building two blocks from campus. The Kosher Kitchen, as the place is known, helps many Yale students keep kosher for Passover. But it also provides a more comprehensive service. It has been serving kosher food to Yale students year-round for the past 25 years.

The Israeli Army announced today that it had demolished four houses in the Gaza Strip belonging to the families of the Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a bus Thursday night. The buildings were razed Friday morning, only hours after troops stormed the bus, where the hijackers were holding about 35 passengers hostage. A 19-year-old Israeli woman died and seven other passengers were injured. The army said all four terrorists were killed.

IF, despite all good intentions, you have not completed your New York State tax return, do not despair: Roderick G. W. Chu of Briarcliff Manor may well be in the same position. Although he expected to be finished with his own taxes by now, Mr. Chu did not rule out the possibility that he would be spending much of today and beyond working on them. If hopelessness is gaining ground as the hours fly away, why not take a few minutes and drop Mr. Chu a blue IT-370, the form called ''Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File.'' If you do all that, Mr. Chu, the state's Commissioner of the Department of Taxation and Finance, will be glad to allow you another four months to tug your hair, conscience and purse strings. Mr. Chu, who was named to his position 13 months ago by Governor Cuomo, said that when he was asked to be a candidate for the commissioner's job, he sought the advice of his 86-year-old grandfather, who lived with him.

A private foundation established in 1980 to help President-elect Reagan's transition to office has rebuffed requests from the General Accounting Office to examine its books. The foundation raised and spent almost $1 million between the election and the inauguration, according to its tax returns. That amount was in addition to $2 million from the General Services Administration, which buys and manages Government property and supplies. Transition planners for Mr. Reagan said in 1980 that they were raising private money because the G.S.A. funds would not be enough to pay for salaries and expenses. A month after the inauguration, $286,590 of the G.S.A. money was left over, according to the Comptroller General, although additional bills could have been received later.

MICHAEL deCOURCY HINDS BENEC INDUSTRIES, a Manhattan energy-management concern, says it can reduce a Bronx apartment building's fuel bills by 30 percent, or about $32,000 a year, by updating its three-year old heating system and installing a computer to monitor and control it. Scallop Thermal Management, an Edison, N.J., energy-management company, contends that it can reduce the $4.5 million annual electric bill of the Celanese Building by more than $250,000 by installing computerized controls in the 1.7 million-square-foot building in Rockefeller Center. Energy-saving claims like these may seem as stale as the 1979 energy crisis, which opened the nation's doors to a flood of experimental contraptions, mechanical engineers who designed creative cures and high-priced contractors who did the work but made no promises. All financial and technical risks were borne by the property owners - if they could afford to try the conservation measures at all. But Benec and Scallop are at the forefront of an emerging industry of energy-management companies so confident they can produce significant savings that they will assume most of the financial and technical risk. In other words, if they do not conserve energy, the companies do not get paid.

The Texas Board of Education today repealed a decade-old rule that required textbooks used in the state's public schools to describe evolution as ''only one of several explanations'' of the origin of human beings and to present it as ''theory rather than fact.'' Critics had charged that textbook publishers had to water down their treatment of evolution in books sold all over the country if they wanted to sell textbooks in Texas. Texas spends about $65 million a year on texts, making the state the fourth largest market in the country. But, there was disagreement over what effect the repeal would have.