What was going on when I was born?

Simon Wincer sat in the back of a taxicab with three cans of film on his lap one sweltering afternoon in Manhattan last summer, cursing the heat and the midtown traffic. ''What movie you got in those cans?'' the driver asked. ''It's called 'Phar Lap,' '' the director replied. ''He was a race horse in Australia.'' ''Phar Lap? You gotta be kidding,'' the driver said, pulling out of the lane and committing the first of several traffic violations that got Mr. Wincer to his destination just in time. ''I saw him run at Agua Caliente in 1932. He was the best. I always thought someone should make a movie outta him.''

Cleanup crews worked round the clock Friday night and today to swab up an estimated 5,000 tons of tar-like crude oil that smeared miles of the Texas coast from the Louisiana line to below Galveston Bay. With heavy equipment, vacuum trucks and acres of plastic batting, they fought the wind-driven wash of oil from an 85-mile-long slick from a British tanker that ran aground off Louisiana Monday, inundating broad areas of shoreline all along the upper Texas coast. But gentle low tides helped guide the oil away from critical marine and wildlife breeding areas in Galveston Bay. Slick Moving Southeast The huge serpentine slick, which split into two prongs on its leading edge as it moved slowly southeast down the shore, turned inland Friday night and continued to lap ashore late this afternoon.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission has approved the basic design for a 28-unit apartment house to be built in the heart of the Greenwich Village Historic District on the Avenue of the Americas between Waverly and Washington Places. The six-story building, to be called Washington Place, will rise to on a 16,800-square-foot parcel, the site of a former Kinney parking lot. It will occupy the entire eastern blockfront of the avenue and extend about 30 feet along both Washington and Waverly Places.

Until recently, the commercial base of Franklin Township, N.J., which stretches from New Brunswick to Princeton, had been mostly agricultural. But seven years ago, hoping to spur commercial development, township officials allocated about $7 million to a program to improve such public facilities as roads and sewage systems.

President Reagan took the campaign offensive on the tax issue today by vowing to veto any income tax rise and accusing Walter F. Mondale of planning increases that would average $1,500 a household. ''I will propose no increase in personal income taxes,'' the President declared in a paid political radio address from his ranch here, ''and I will veto any tax bill that would raise personal income tax rates for working Americans or that would fail to make our tax system simpler or more fair.'' In vowing to use the veto, Mr. Reagan went further than he did previously in rejecting Mr. Mondale's charge that he had a ''secret'' plan to raise taxes if he was re-elected. Statement Not Qualified The President also did not repeat the qualified wording he has used lately in campaign appearances in which he said he might eventually have to consider a tax increase as ''a last resort'' after trimming the Federal budget deeply. Some of his political advisers, gauging the effectiveness of the Mondale charge lately, had been urging a more clear-cut rebuttal of the Democrat's ''secret plan'' charge.

Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader, says that he expects to be chosen to form a new Israeli government soon and that he intends to seek the widest coalition possible. Mr. Peres said he hoped to get such a mandate from President Chaim Herzog, possibly Sunday. He has been negotiating with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the incumbent Likud bloc, to explore the possibility of forming a national unity government. The sessions have not included the smaller parties, however, and many Israelis, frustrated by the political impasse that emerged from the elections July 23, were assuming that any such national government would bypass the often specific and ideological demands of the smaller factions.

Every three months, the Central Opera Service, a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Opera, puts outs its Bulletin, a major portion of which is a listing of operatic premieres, domestic and international, recent and forthcoming. The summer 1984 issue, which is not atypical, contains a positively dizzying number of such novelties. And they're hardly all grimly serious, gratingly dissonant, modernist statements about the human condition, either, or worthy folk operas of the sort our more provincial regional companies have traditionally purveyed. Instead, the typical new opera today is likely to be a gently disorienting but still alluring, dreamlike vision, gorgeously colorful in its design. Or it may be a brightly colored, cheerfully tuneful confection not far removed from the Broadway stage. The reason it sounds so close to Broadway is that, often as not, it actually started its life on Broadway. To get some notion of the variety that an organ of America's leading opera company now incorporates within the very idea of ''opera,'' consider just a few highlights from the Bulletin's latest listing.

THE performance of the economy and how it affects the lives of Americans, rich, poor and middle-class, is shaping up as a major issue at this month's Republican National Convention in Dallas, as it was at last month's Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. In overall terms, everything, or almost everything, has been coming up roses for President Reagan this year. Growth has been soaring, with gross national product climbing at a real annual rate of 10.1 percent in the first quarter and 7.5 percent in the second. Inflation, measured by rising consumer prices, is below 4 percent, compared with 12.4 percent in 1980. Unemployment, which had reached a peak of nearly 12 percent at the end of the 1981-82 recession, fell to 7 percent in June. And while last week's report on July showed the jobless rate for civilian and military workers bouncing up to 7.4 percent and total employment dropping by 353,000 jobs, these figures also could be read to suggest a healthy cooling down of a hot rate of growth. The stock market, driven by expectations about interest rates, had already taken off like a missile; it boosted itself to 1202.08, up 87.24 points for the week.

IN recent months, industry after industry has lined up at the President's door asking for help against imports. This summer, steel, copper and machine tools are all waiting for President Reagan to approve the import quotas they say they need to survive. They have seen the President award import protection to the nation's textile manufacturers, to Detroit's auto makers, to Milwaukee's Harley-Davidson motorcycle company and to Pennsylvania's specialty steel producers and even its mushroom growers. And now they feel their time has come for relief. While they have turned to the White House, the nation's wine makers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment have taken a different route, marching to Capitol Hill to demand special trade legislation.

Since Wall Street makes money whether investors are buying or selling, last week's record volume bodes well for brokerage industry profits, which have been battered this year. ''They're coming off a brutal first half and this has brought smiles to a lot of sour faces,'' said Jeffrey M. Schaefer, senior vice president of the Securities Industry Association. ''A lackluster July may turn into a dynamite August.'' It's a rule-of-thumb that the industry breaks even after about 90 million shares, so volumes like Friday's record 238.8 million on the New York Stock Exchange goes directly to the bottom line. Wall Street's dismal 4 percent after-tax return on equity could rise to 10 to 14 percent, if this activity continues another month or two, according to Mr. Schaefer. Perrin Long, an analyst with Lipper Analytical Services, predicts 90- to 100 million-share days through September. Institutions have so far been the big players, trading massive blocks. Now all eyes are on the little investor, since the average profit per share is about 40 cents for retail trades compared with about 10 cents a share for institutions. Mr. Long expects that if equity prices continue to rise, small investors should return to the market this week or next.

WAS the rescue of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company just the end of a chapter on a big troubled bank or the beginning of a new book on the woes of the American banking industry? That is the kind of question the financial community is asking in wake of the the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's $4.5 billion takover of the once mighty Chicago bank. Was Continental a unique case, or do other money center banks also face serious trouble ahead? Does the system of deposit insurance need changing to insure both large and small depositors? How do bankers avoid the mistakes made by Continental? What will be the long-term effects of Continental's failure and the Government's action on the entire banking system? Four prominent members of the financial community sat down last week and discussed these issues: Hans H. Angermueller, vice chairman of Citicorp; John G. Heimann, deputy chairman of the Wall Street firm of Becker Paribas Inc. and Comptroller of the Currency during the Carter Administration; Alan Greenspan, chairman of the economics consulting firm of Townsend-Greenspan and chairman of President Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and Thomas G. Labrecque, president and chief operating officer of the Chase Manhattan Corporation. Excerpts of their roundtable discussion with banking reporter Robert A. Bennett and Nathaniel C. Nash, an editor of the Sunday Business section, follow.

Li Ning of China won three gold medals and one silver, and the Americans gave their best individual apparatus showing in history tonight, in the final men's gymnastics competition of the 1984 Olympics. Peter Vidmar and Bart Conner of the United States each won gold medals, Vidmar on the pommel horse and Conner on the parallel bars, while Mitch Gaylord won a silver and two bronzes and Tim Daggett earned a bronze. Those were added to the silver medal that Vidmar won in the individual all-around contest Thursday night and the gold medal the team won Tuesday night. Since 1932, the only Olympic gymnastics medal won by an American had been the bronze in floor exercise by Peter Kormann in 1976 at Montreal.