What was going on when I was born?

Text of statements, page B8. WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 - Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro and her husband today released a mass of financial records intended to quiet the controversy over the handling of their finances. The documents answered many questions but also raised some new ones. The records confirmed earlier reports that the Democratic nominee for Vice President, and her husband, John A. Zaccaro, had underpaid their 1978 income taxes because of an error for which they blamed their accountant. The accountant agreed in an interview that he had been responsible. But the records also showed that Mrs. Ferraro, a Queens Congresswoman, had received income from a real estate business she owns jointly with her husband. This raised questions about whether she had failed to meet ethics rules of the House of Representatives by not reporting this income.

For the first time since David Stull opened his jewelery store on this village's fashion alley more than six years ago, he is staying open long after the sun has set. He is not alone. Faced with declining sales, about 40 merchants in this resort area have lengthened their days. ''These good times are tough times for us,'' said Mr. Stull, the owner of Job's Lane Jewelers and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.

George P. Shultz voiced confidence that freedom would someday be restored to the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. In a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago, the Secretary of State echoed a theme struck by President Reagan on Friday in opposing the ''subjugation'' of Eastern Europe. (Page A1, Cols. 3-4.) India's main opposition parties joined in calling for rallies and demonstrations Saturday outside Government offices to protest what they consider Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's increasing disregard of democratic practices. The opposition parties rarely act together. (A3:4-6.)

''Patience is a virtue in foreign affairs as much as in our personal lives.

In a world where people can count the number of molecules on a pinhead, oil experts cannot seem to determine how much of the most widely used energy source is in commerce or even what it costs on a given day. Last month, for example, assessments of daily production by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ranged from 17.2 million barrels to 18.6 million - a variation greater than the initial oil shortages of 1973 or 1979. Similarly, the two major domestic oil price reporting services disagreed nearly every day on the price of heating oil and gasoline at New York Harbor. Yet oil sales and investments add up to a multibillion-dollar business daily. Major government and corporate policy decisions are based on oil supplies and prices. But most of that money is spent and decisions made on the basis of information that is often very uncertain and sometimes wrong, oil experts agree.

Investors led by Irwin L. Jacobs, a Minneapolis financier, said yesterday that they had reached an agreement with Tidewater Inc. to study the acquisition of the New Orleans-based energy service company. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Jacobs group said it had acquired 1.49 million Tidewater shares since February, or about 8.9 percent of the total outstanding. The last 59,300 shares were acquired between April 11 and June 29 at prices ranging from $22.50 a share to $26.125.

The recent rally in stocks has reignited interest in one of Wall Street's more arcane products - convertible securities. Unsure whether equities will continue to forge ahead and reluctant to forgo high yields in the bond market, many professional and individual investors are turning to convertibles to hedge their bets. A convertible debenture is a hybrid of the stock and bond markets. It is sold as a $1,000 face value bond, with a fixed maturity and coupon, but it allows an investor to exchange the bond for a fixed amount of common shares of the issuing corporation. Convertible preferred stock is structured similarly, except it has no fixed maturity. Since the beginning of this month, when stocks suddenly rallied, the volume in convertible securities on any given day has been 50 percent to 100 percent higher than the July daily average, according to Marc K. Suvall, director of the convertible securities department at the First Boston Corporation.

Everywhere, there are women. And, everywhere, there are Republican officials pointing out the fact that women are everywhere. ''Katherine Ortega is giving the longest speech at the convention and Jeane Kirkpatrick is giving the second longest,'' said Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Each day press releases are issued from the Republican National Committee with mathematical proof of women's power. ''Republican women, without a quota system, make up approximately half of the delegates and alternates to the convention,'' said one.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1984 The Economy The economy grew at a 7.6 percent pace in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said. The rate of growth was slightly higher than the 7.5 percent originally reported for the period but still significantly eased from the 10.1 percent rate of the first quarter. Inflation, as measured by an index tied to the gross national product, rose at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the second quarter, down from a 4.4 percent pace in the first quarter. (Page A1.)

BOB Tomaso says he has grown accustomed to the reactions he gets from friends around home in Milford, Mass., when they find out what sort of college he attends. Mr. Tomaso is entering his senior year at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., an institution that does not admit women as undergraduates. ''I tell my friends that it is all-male and they think I am some kind of weirdo,'' said Mr. Tomaso, 21 years old, an economics major who persuaded himself to go to the school by reasoning: ''It can't be all bad since it's been around for more than 200 years.'' As it turns out, Mr. Tomaso and his fellow seniors will be the last class of undergraduates to attend Washington and Lee without the company of women. The university has decided to admit women in the fall of 1985 despite opposition from some of the 3,150 students who put stickers on their cars proclaiming: ''Better Dead Than Coed.'' The demise of the nation's all-male colleges, once a major feature of the higher education landscape, will be close at hand with the change at Washington and Lee. Hampden-Sydney College, also in Virginia, and Wabash College in Indiana are the best known of the fewer than a half-dozen surviving nonmilitary liberal arts colleges for men that are not formally linked to a women's college.

-CALORIE sweeteners, perhaps the most thoroughly studied of all food additives, are undergoing a new scientific evaluation that already seems to be changing judgments about their relative value and safety. Studies have now confirmed beyond any doubt that saccharin, the most widely used artificial sweetener in the country, is a weak carcinogen that causes bladder tumors in rats, even at levels in the diet somewhat lower than previously realized. Thus saccharin, the only artificial sweetener allowed on the American market in the 1970's, is turning out to have the most thoroughly documented health risk of any sweetener, although the risk appears very small. In contrast, cyclamate, which was once the most feared of the sweeteners and was banned as a possible carcinogen in 1970, may be headed for at least partial rehabilitation. The Food and Drug Administration's cancer assessment committee concluded in April that cyclamate is not a carcinogen after all, and the National Research Council has been commissioned to issue an independent judgment.

The blue spruce now soars 80 feet, its needled branches spreading outward in thick layers. When Dr. Anna W. Perkins planted a three-inch spruce seedling in 1929, right next to her newly built white clapboard house, she had already been practicing ''country medicine'' for one year here in the foothills of the Catskills. For 56 years, Dr. Perkins has tended to the country people here, where gentle hills full with corn seem draped in coverlets of green corduroy. She watched the Depression ravish these hills. She has seen family farming yield to larger farms. She has seen three generations of men she delivered as babies trudge off to fight in three wars. She has seen generations of children, some gaunt and unwashed, give way to generations healthy and well scrubbed.