What was going on when I was born?

The Chase Manhattan Corporation, the nation's third-largest banking organization, yesterday reported a decline in first-quarter net income, but two other large banking companies, the Security Pacific Corporation and the Bankers Trust New York Corporation, reported modest increases. At Chase, net income declined 3.4 percent, to $102.5 million in the first quarter of 1984, from $106.1 million in the comparable period of 1983. The per-share decline amounted to 6.6 percent, to $2.55, from $2.73. The bank attributed the decline primarily to a $16 million drop in pretax net interest income, the difference between how much it spent for its funds and how much it received on its loans and investments. It said that $9 million of that decline reflected pretax interest that was due but not received on nonaccrual loans to private borrowers in Argentina.

Memphis is a chicken town. It is also, apparently, a harbinger of the fast-food future. ''In Memphis there must be a chicken franchise for every 9,000 people,'' said Thomas Heskamp, marketing director of Sisters Chicken and Biscuits, an Ohio-based chain owned by Wendy's International Inc. ''There must be more than 80, including Bojangles, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Mrs. Winner's, Church's, Popeye's, Pirtle's and Sisters.'' Elsewhere in the nation, the story is increasingly similar. ''The competitive battle will heat up,'' predicts Joseph Doyle, an analyst for Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company. ''It's a growing category. The American consumer has shifted toward chicken.''

TWO interns at Worcester City Hospital have acknowledged in an interview that they were awarded medical degrees by a university in the Dominican Republic that they never attended. ''I don't think I've done anything wrong, but in retrospect maybe I did,'' said Raymond Allard, one of the interns, who received a medical degree in June 1982 from the Universidad Centro de Estudios Tecnologicos, generally known as Universidad Cetec, in Santo Domingo. Mr. Allard said in the interview here that he had paid about $9,000 to Pedro de Mesones, a broker in medical credentials, for a Universidad Cetec degree and transcript. Mr. de Mesones is serving a three-year sentence in Federal prison after being convicted on two counts of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud in the sale of bogus medical degrees. The other intern, Barbara Gillon, also said in the interview that she received a medical degree from Universidad Cetec in June 1982 without doing any work there. She said she, too, had been a client of Mr. de Mesones.

''I think if one is so deeply dependent on the United States one has a right to voice one's interests.

Revenge over drug dealings may have led gunmen to murder 10 people - including eight children and a pregnant woman - in a Brooklyn house, the police said yesterday. Paraphernalia commonly used by drug dealers was found in the first-floor railroad flat of the two-story house where the slayings took place Sunday afternoon, the police said. Officials said it was the worst mass murder in New York City that they could remember. ''I don't think any of us has ever seen a shooting like this,'' said the city's Deputy Police Commissioner, Patrick Murphy. He said that the rampage could have been a ''reprisal killing'' by drug dealers.

The C.I.A. reversed itself and acknowledged it had delayed for six weeks a response to a request by the Senate intelligence committee for a briefing on covert activity in Nicaragua. (Page A1, Column 6.) A Salvadoran conservative leader of a large party said he would remain neutral in next month's presidential runoff. Political officials said the decision was a blow to the far right presidential candidate, Roberto d'Aubuisson. (A1:5.)

THE makers of small turboprop business aircraft are returning to an idea used by the Wright Brothers with a ''backwards'' configuration they say will make their new craft virtually stall-proof. The Beech Aircraft Corporation's Starship 1 prototype and the Gates Learjet Corporation's GP-180 mockup, with their short, whisker-like front wings and swept-back Star Wars appearance, do not look much like the plane flown in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But with their nose-mounted wings and rear ''pusher'' propellers they echo the aeronautical design of the earliest airplanes. An 85 percent scale model of the Starship has now flown some 220 hours on an ambitious schedule aiming at certification and sale of full-scale craft at the end of next year. Aeronautical tests of the GP-180, which exists so far only in plywood, have been successful enough for its developers to have firmly committed it to production, and to plan marketing it a year after the Beech aircraft. The rear-wing design, known as ''canard'' for the French word for duck because of its unexpected ''backwards'' look, with its smaller wings in front of the larger ones, is combined in varying degrees in these new craft with advanced materials and new production techniques.

The merger, if approved by shareholders of both companies and regulatory agencies, would give the combined company a broader product line in the telecommunications industry, according to James L. Donald, chief executive officer of Digital Switch. Granger manufactures auxiliary equipment to be used with the type of digital switching equipment made by the Texas company for local telephone companies, private telecommunications networks and cellular radio systems. A Supplier to A.T.&T. Granger has had several contracts as a supplier to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

OF all the elements that set the therapy hour apart from other human encounters, one of the most obvious - and least-discussed - is its time limit. An increasing number of therapists, both here and in Europe, are coming to question the wisdom of the fixed length of the therapeutic hour. At the same time, a trend toward shortened therapy sessions and assembly-line scheduling has been the object of sharp criticism. Some critics see money-making as the motive rather than care for the patient. Dr. Judd Marmor, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, described the trend in an interview last week as ''destructive to some patients.''

TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1984 Companies Carter Hawley moved to thwart The Limited's tender offer. The retailer sold a million shares of a new convertible preferred to General Cinema and plans to purchase up to 15 million shares of its own stock. It also gave General Cinema a six-month option to buy the Waldenbooks chain. The package left General Cinema with a 22 percent stake. The Limited, which seeks 53.6 percent of Carter Hawley, said it would seek an injunction against the measures. (Page D1.) Digital Switch and Granger Associates agreed to merge to broaden their product line in the telecommunications industry. The value of the merger was put at $358 million. (D1.)

Carter Hawley Hale Stores, finally moving on several fronts to fight a tender offer by The Limited Inc., said yesterday that it had sold a million shares of a new convertible preferred stock to the General Cinema Corporation for $300 million in cash and would also purchase up to 15 million shares of its own stock. Carter Hawley said the planned stock purchase ''is intended to defeat the attempt by Limited to gain voting control of the company.'' Carter Hawley also gave General Cinema a six-month option to purchase the Waldenbooks chain for about $285 million. Offer Called 'Inadequate' The Los Angeles-based Carter Hawley, one of the nation's largest retailers, recommended that its shareholders reject The Limited's cash and stock merger offer as ''inadequate.''

He is the dean of third world economists, the man who wrote the book on development as he led the poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere in demanding a new world economic order that would break their dependency on the richer countries of the North. Now 83 years old, and after nearly four decades as an international figure living outside his country, Raul Prebisch has returned home and is still making waves. It was Mr. Prebisch, as special economic adviser to President Raul Alfonsin, who privately negotiated the broad outlines of a national austerity plan two weeks ago with the International Monetary Fund. That plan gave international banks, the Reagan Administration and four Latin countries the assurance they wanted before signing a $500 million package designed to rescue Argentina from overdue interest on its $45 billion foreign debt.