What was going on when I was born?

SOME people thought John Baptist Greco was crazy 28 years ago, when he first began to build ''Holy Land U.S.A.'' ''Why are you doing this?'' they would ask, as Mr. Greco, the son of a shoemaker, mixed concrete, moved boulders and fashioned cast-off statuary and windows, scrap iron, lumber, plastic and wire, discarded mannequins and old automobile paint into a 17-acre reconstruction of ancient Bethlehem and Jerusalem on a steep, rocky hill overlooking the industrial city of Waterbury. ''Why,'' Mr. Greco, a tiny man with wisps white hair and dark, expressive eyes, would reply. ''For the glory of God.'' Holy Land U.S.A. was open to visitors of all denominations, with Mr. Greco giving tours, showing film strips and otherwise telling them the story of Jesus' life and death. Now, a victim of progress, the elements and vandals, Holy Land U.S.A. is closed for the first time in its 28-year history.

The Federal Department of Energy is involved in intense negotiations aimed at saving the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, according to documents obtained by a House subcommittee. The department, according to these documents, is seeking a way for the Federal Government to lend its legal authority to the Long Island Lighting Company's plan for the company to evacuate the area around the plant in the event of an accident. The Lilco emergency plan recently failed an evaluation by the Federal Government because of technical problems and questions about the legal authority of Lilco employees to take steps in an emergency that would usually be taken by public-safety officials. The documents indicate that the Energy Department, which favors the operation of Shoreham, is seeking to develop some solution by Friday, when Lilco faces a major financial hurdle. The department has been engaged in intensive talks with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the White House and Lilco since the beginning of this month, the documents show. It is not clear from the documents which party initiated the discussion.

PRINCETON, N.J. IT was usually about 6:30 A.M. when he finished work and headed for the bus stop. Larry Ellis, then a teen-ager, would take the bus to his family's apartment, and soon afterward, leave again for school. He had finished his rounds as a part-time milkman, accompanying a neighbor who had given him the job on his Bronx route in the days when milk was delivered by horse and wagon. ''A nice horse,'' Ellis remembers. Sometimes, the neighbor would even let Ellis ride on the horse's back as the trusty steed clippety-clopped down the quiet streets in the predawn hours, past the apartments and one- family homes where the workingmen and women were still asleep.

If Andre Robertson had not bobbled Buddy Bell's grounder, it would have been sufficient. If Toby Harrah had not bobbled Larry Parrish's grounder, it would have been sufficient. If Rick Cerone or Don Mattingly had made good throws with Parrish running, it would have been sufficient. But the four Yankee players did not make the plays when they had the chance, and their combined efforts resulted in a Texas run, which was sufficient for the Rangers to beat the Yankees, 1-0, yesterday at Yankee Stadium.

Something Going On Arms Control Negotiations on nuclear weapons may seem dead for now, but the arms race being the growth field it is, there's always plenty else to talk about. Vice President Bush flew to Geneva last week to present the Administration's proposals for banning chemical weapons at the 40-nation Conference on Disarmament. In Vienna, North Atlantic Treaty Organization delegates unveiled a new formula for reducing the forces of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, more than two million altogether, stationed in Central Europe. The Soviet Union said it would study both proposals, but heaped scorn on them.

SOMEWHERE between the forbidding peaks of Manhattan office costs and the welcoming valleys of suburban prices - there are four boroughs. The Koch administration insists it is doing everything it can to persuade back-office operators that they would do better settling in Brooklyn or Queens than leapfrogging over to New Jersey or Long Island. But the city doesn't have too much to show yet for its effort. That failure is of considerable concern for the city, and for the real-estate industry, because an increasing number of companies are finding that they can cut costs sharply by moving their back-office employees - bookkeepers, record clerks, computer operators and the like - out of high- cost prime office space in Manhattan while retaining smaller blocks of that prime space for the executives and deal makers who have to be in prestige office buildings in midtown or downtown. Last year, the Julien J. Studley real-estate brokerage, sales and consulting firm found the following office rents around the metropolitan area: - Manhattan: Prime space from $30 to $40 and superior space from $40 to $50, going ''to as high as $55 and more for top-rate Midtown office space.''

ELLISDALE FOR three years, Robert Denton has been haunting the banks of a small tributary of Crosswicks Creek in this Burlington County community, searching the shallow waters for signs of ancient life. His persistence has paid off with the remains of dinosaurs, fish, sharks, turtles and alligators, remains that help put together a picture of what New Jersey was like before man was here to observe it. Mr. Denton, a chemist for Johnson & Johnson, is one of almost 100 amateur and a dozen professional paleontologists who roam New Jersey in search of fossils. Dr. Donald Baird, director and curator of the Natural History Museum at Princeton University, said that perhaps 98 percent of all fossil discoveries in New Jersey had been made by amateurs.

THERE are many memorable passages in Virginia Woolf's diaries, but none more poignant than the entry for Sunday, 25 July 1926, which records the visit of the 45-year- old Virginia with Thomas Hardy at his home in Dorset. Hardy, then 86 years old, the greatest novelist of his time, the author of ''The Mayor of Casterbridge,'' ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles,'' ''Jude the Obscure,'' now ''sets no great stock by literature,'' she writes, but is immensely interested in facts. Whatever one might expect of Thomas Hardy, it is somehow not the ''little puffy cheeked cheerful old man, with an atmosphere cheerful & businesslike in Joyce Carol Oates, author of ''The Profane Art: Essays & Reviews,'' teaches at Princeton University. Her latest novel is ''Mysteries of Winterthurn.'' addressing us, rather like an old doctor's or solicitor's.'' Hardy seems to be, at this point in his life, ''delivered'' of all his work: He is not much interested in his novels, or in anyone's novels; does not in fact read fiction any longer. Much is made of the ease - ''I never took long with them'' - with which he wrote both novels and poetry. But now it is all very distant and mildly amusing, the world of literary activity and literary significance. As Mrs. Woolf reports: ''The whole thing - literature, novels etc. - all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously. Yet he had sympathy & pity for those still engaged in it. But what his secret interests & activities are - to what occupation he trotted off when we left him - I do not know.''

DAVID E. SANGER Afew days after Sierra On-Line signed a top-secret contract last year to develop software for the International Business Machines Corporation, four men showed up at Sierra's headquarters in Oakhurst, Calif., conspicuously dressed in dark, three-piece suits. They explained to the company's president, Ken Williams, that they were from I.B.M. and ''were just passing through'' Oakhurst, a resort town outside Yosemite National Park. For such casual visitors, their inspection of Sierra's operation was awfully minute: They sifted through wastebaskets for documents stamped ''I.B.M. Confidential,'' rattled metal security bars on filing cabinets and tested the locks on the door to a special, isolated room with shrouded windows. In subsequent visits, also unannounced, the men paid particular attention to that isolated room. For inside, Sierra programmers were toiling with an I.B.M. treasure - a prototype of the PCjr, I.B.M.'s still secret entry in the home computer market. Sierra had been hired, in advance of the public unveiling, to develop HomeWord, the PCjr's word processing program.

When Third Avenue was opened to sunshine after the elevated came down in 1955, buildings 18 to 34 stories high replaced the old walkups. Now, in a second stage of development, the buildings are going even higher.

MORE than 38,000 men and women are signed up to take a three-hour examination Saturday to become Suffolk County police officers. The large number of applicants, the most ever for a municipal test anywhere in the state outside of New York City, reflects a county recruiting drive to bring more women and minorities into the ranks of sworn officers, more than 95 percent of whom are white, non-Hispanic males. It is also a response to a United States Department of Justice suit filed in July 1983 charging discrimination against women, blacks and Hispanic people in county police hiring. While denying it ever knowingly discriminated, the county hired the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., to devise an examination especially for Suffolk. The new examination seeks to eliminate cultural bias by rating applicants on skills that are not directly related to police work in Suffolk. County Attorney Martin Bradley Ashare said it is meant to satisfy Justice Department objections to a more academic state examination for police the county relied on in 1979, the year of the most recent examination.

An aging four-story brownstone on the northwest corner of 84th Street and Second Avenue is getting a new face and a new life in a two-stage modernization. The first stage, which should be completed in a month or so, includes the refacing of the ground floor with marble and imported stone ornaments.