What was going on when I was born?

The State Department said today that the Reagan Administration decided this year not to discourage private American citizens and foreign governments from supporting Nicaraguan rebels. The department spokesman, John Hughes, said the decision was made after Congress refused to approve more money for the rebels, but he denied that the decision was made to circumvent Congress. ''Provided U.S. funds are not used, we do not discourage other countries from providing support, nor have we discouraged legal private U.S. contributions,'' Mr. Hughes said. A Change in Position Mr. Hughes's comments were the first acknowledgement by the Administration that its response to outside aid to the rebels was based on a high-level policy decision. Administration officials had previously said that any failure to take action against private groups aiding the rebels was the result of a breakdown in coordination between Federal agencies.

The Miss America Pageant got under way here today, a booming business whose formula for economic success is a shoestring budget and an army of volunteers. Thousands of people have come to this oceanside resort in anticipation. Hotels are swamped. The coronation of a new Miss America on Saturday will play to a standing-room-only crowd and an expected television audience of up to a third of the country's population. Pageant officials had been concerned that the controversy surrounding the publication of sexually explicit photographs of Vanessa Williams, who was picked as Miss America at last year's pageant, and her giving up of the title in July would dampen enthusiasm. But they now believe that the affair has increased interest in the event.

Remarkable successes in transplantation of cells into the brains of animals have encouraged the belief that the therapy may eventually become practical for the treatment of human illnesses. Until recently there seemed little hope of ever coping directly with such effects of aging as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease or with other forms of brain damage, and most researchers still believe application of the new brain-cell transplant techniques to human patients remains distant. Nevertheless, the current work is promising enough that at least one medical team, a group in Sweden, has tried twice to treat severe cases of Parkinsonism by adrenal transplants and is preparing for further attempts. At a recent international conference in Lund, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm described in detail for the first time the two human transplant efforts they conducted in 1982 and 1983. Key cells were taken from an adrenal gland near the kidney of each patient and, with a springlike device, were inserted near a portion of the brain whose loss of function was causing Parkinson's disease. Parkinsonism appears to result from the degradation of cells in tissue known as the substantia nigra, from which nerve fibers normally deliver a substance, called dopamine, into a neighboring part of the brain, the striatum. There the dopamine's role is to initiate voluntary muscular movements, and its absence leads to loss of control and the involuntary movements characteristic of the disease.

Israeli and American agents have broken a major international counterfeiting ring with the arrest of 10 Soviet Georgian emigres and the seizure of $13 million in bogus United States currency, officials in New York said yesterday. In simultaneous raids Friday, the Israeli police arrested seven men in Israel and the United States Secret Service arrested three in Brooklyn. All are Israeli citizens who emigrated from Georgia, a republic considered a center for organized crime in the Soviet Union. The counterfeit bills were seized in Israel, and none were distributed, said James D'Amelio, a United States Secret Service special agent who coordinated the raids with the Israeli National Police.

Alan J. Hirschfield is resigning as chairman and chief executive officer of the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, according to an announcement from him and Marvin Davis, the company's owner. A brief news release from the company said that Mr. Hirschfield would remain on its board and serve as a consultant. It also said that Mr. Hirschfield and Mr. Davis intend ''to form a partnership to pursue investment banking activities both in Los Angeles and New York.'' The resignation will take effect as soon as Mr. Hirschfield's successor is named, the announcement added.

A caption on the first page of SportsMonday yesterday with a picture of John McEnroe lying on his back during the final match of the U.S. Open inaccurately explained the action. McEnroe was holding up his hands as he started to protest an official's call.

Disaster seemed to be facing Quotron Systems Inc. last spring, when Merrill Lynch & Company and the International Business Machines Corporation announced plans to form a joint venture - called International Marketnet - to provide computerized services to brokerage firms. Not only were the two giants setting themselves up in competition to Quotron, the market leader in the business of supplying stock quotations to brokerage firms, but the Los Angeles- based company faced the loss of its single biggest customer. Last year, Merrill Lynch accounted for one- quarter of Quotron's revenues. On the day last March that Merrill Lynch and I.B.M. announced their news, Quotron's stock plunged in over-the-counter trading by 4, to 10. ''When it was high, it was very, very high,'' said Milton E. Mohr, the company's president and chief executive officer. ''But I never expected it to drop as far as it did.''

The Archbishop of New York and Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro discussed their dispute over abortion yesterday, but apparently failed to resolve the question of whether she had misrepresented the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine on abortion. After a half-hour telephone talk initiated by Mrs. Ferraro, they gave sharply different views of a 1982 letter, signed by Mrs. Ferraro, that the Archbishop cited as the basis for his accusation Sunday that the Democratic Vice- Presidential candidate had created a mistaken impression that church teaching on abortion was open to interpretation. 'A Pretty Basic Disagreement' Archbishop John J. O'Connor reiterated his charge and said: ''The teaching of the Catholic church is monolithic on the subject of abortion, and it is stated in a letter signed by Mrs. Ferraro that it is not monolithic. Now that, to me, is a pretty basic disagreement.''

Discrimination would be forbidden at a number of private clubs in New York City under a bill approved yesterday by a City Council panel. After more than a year of emotional words in public and intense lobbying in private, the bill passed quietly during a brief morning meeting of the Council's General Welfare Committee. The members approved the measure, 5 to 1. A club defined by the bill as a public accommodation, and therefore subject to the city's anti-bias laws, is one that ''has more than 400 members, provides regular meal service and regularly receives payment for dues, fees, use of space, facilities, services, meals or beverages directly or indirectly from or on behalf of nonmembers for the furtherance of trade or business.'' The bill makes it unlawful to judge membership applications or to refuse ''accommodations, advantages, facilities or privileges'' on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin or sex.

The following article is based on reporting by Marcia Chambers and Sam Roberts and was written by Mr. Roberts. Judges in New York City awarded more than $6.8 million in fees during the last 19 months under a system that often employed local politicians and their relatives and associates. The fees were paid to people appointed to oversee the financial affairs of infants, missing persons and people incapacitated by illness or age, or to resolve the estates of people who died. Zaccaro's Role at Issue A computer printout of the 3,525 cases in which fees were approved between Jan. 1, 1983, and July 31, 1984, contains the names of present and former public officials and local political leaders, retired judges, the children of judges, and lawyers who have distinguished themselves by their service to party organizations or to individual candidates, as well as others whose practices appear to depend heavily on the courts' largess. Concerns have been raised periodically that the judiciary can be compromised by cozy relations between the courthouse and the political clubhouse. The controversy was revived last month after a court-appointed referee questioned the propriety of John A. Zaccaro's management of the estate of an elderly Queens woman. Mr. Zaccaro had borrowed $175,000 from her assets for the real-estate business of which he and his wife, Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democratic Vice- Presidential nominee, were officers.

An article last Saturday on theological views of abortion misidentified Rabbi David M. Feldman's synagogue. It is the Teaneck (N.J.) Jewish Center.

After a day of generally steady trading, the United States dollar suddenly burst through the psychologically important barrier of 3 West German marks late yesterday for the first time since January 1973. The dollar ended trading yesterday at its high for the day of 3.0180 marks, up from 2.9905 marks earlier yesterday in London and 2.9948 marks late Friday. That leaves the dollar up 13 pfennigs against the mark, or nearly 4 1/2 percent, since the closing before the Labor Day holiday. The dollar also continued to set record highs yesterday against the currencies of Britain, France and Italy.