What was going on when I was born?

In one of the largest corporate divestitures in recent years, R.J. Reynolds Industries said yesterday that it had agreed to sell its energy operations to the Phillips Petroleum Company for $1.7 billion. Reynolds, the nation's second-largest producer of cigarettes after Philip Morris Inc., said that a substantial portion of the proceeds would be used for a stock repurchase program. The company has about 113.5 million shares outstanding, about half of which are held by institutions. In heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Phillips plunged $2.625 a share, to $39.125. Reynolds rose 62 1/2 cents, to $67.625.

Toyping Wong, who has lived for 40 years in a tenement at 56 Henry Street, says she is going to fight eviction ''because I've got no place else to go and this is my home.'' The 66-year-old garment factory worker is one of 22 tenants of two tenements on Henry Street in Chinatown who have filed a legal complaint against their landlord for ''excessive'' rent increases. They suspect that the increases - and some improvements by the landlord - are a prelude to getting them out and getting in those with more money to spend on rent. Gentrification, it seems, has come at last to Chinatown. .Buildings that have suffered a hundred years of neglect are now being upgraded. Artists have moved into lofts and tenements on the SoHo- Chinatown border.

Federal officials are trying to stop a new technique by which savings institutions have been issuing certificates of deposit to finance real estate ventures generally considered riskier than usual. While the depositors are given a chance to share in any profits the ventures might make, regulators call the practice ''unsafe and unsound'' and are balking at insuring the deposits. Dallas Thrift Unit Balks Under the program, the savings institutions sell C.D.'s - usually maturing in seven or eight years - with a guaranteed minimum interest rate, typically 10 percent. But investors are promised additional income based on the earnings, if any, from the pool of real estate investments.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER, 21, 1984 International The U.S. Embassy was attacked by a suicide car bomber, killing at least 23 people and injuring scores in a Beirut suburb. The assailant, who died in the explosion, detonated the vehicle in front of the six-story building, devastating it. Two Americans were known to be among the dead. The embassy had recently been moved to Aukar in Christian East Beirut because it was thought to be safer than West Beirut. (Page A1, Columns 3-6.) Security measures were incomplete when the United States occupied its new embassy in Beirut, according to a senior State Department official. The area around the embassy was guarded by Lebanese Christian militiamen because a contingent of 80 United States marines was withdrawn seven weeks ago when State Department officials decided it was no longer needed. (A1:5.)

A correction in this space yesterday - referring to the Sports of The Times column on Wednesday - gave a further incorrect chronology of events in the Korean War. The United Nations command's withdrawal to Pusan occurred in the summer of 1950, before either the American landing at Inchon or the Chinese intervention. (A later evacuation by sea to Pusan, by the United States X Army Corps, occurred in December 1950, after all the other events.)

A court-appointed investigator said today that there was ''no basis'' under Federal law for prosecuting Edwin Meese 3d, President Reagan's counselor and nominee for Attorney General. After a five-month inquiry, the investigator, Jacob A. Stein, reported today: ''We find no basis with respect to any of the 11 allegations for the bringing of a prosecution against Mr. Meese for the violation of a Federal criminal statute.'' Several of the allegations involved Mr. Meese's financial dealings with people who received Federal jobs. Another had to do with his failure to report on his financial disclosure forms a $15,000 interest-free loan to his wife. Mr. Stein said in the report that his mandate did not permit him to fulfill ''numerous requests'' to evaluate the propriety or ethics of Mr. Meese's conduct or his ''fitness for the post of Attorney General.''

The United States today called the bombing of the United States Embassy in Beirut ''a senseless, brutal attack'' and a reminder that ''civilized norms of behavior are threatened by those who use terrorism as a political weapon.'' But senior officials said that, despite the frustration and anger over the third such attack against Americans in Beirut in 18 months, there was no plan for any immediate retaliation. Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic Presidential contender, said in Seattle that he would support any ''appropriate countermeasures'' President Reagan might contemplate. (Page A13.) Congressional reaction ranged from criticism of security measures to calls for stronger efforts against terrorism. (Page A12.)

There's cause for rejoicing this week among those who remember fondly the old Museum of Primitive Art, the small but stellar institution that flourished in New York from 1957 until it became the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum. A brand-new facility along the same lines, the Center for African Art, has opened at 54 East 68th Street. Similarly occupying two old town houses, and committed to the high but lively exhibition and educational standards set by the earlier museum, the new center is, however, exclusively devoted to African art, which it will exhibit but not collect. Interestingly, the center was formed by a group of collectors of African art nostalgic for the Primitive Museum, and not wildly excited by the level of activity at the Rockefeller Wing. Their director, and a moving force behind the museum, is Susan Vogel, a former curator at the earlier museum, who also continues as the Met's senior consultant for African art.

Public art in the form of an unusually extensive combination of museum shows, sculptures and monumental murals will become the theme of the Equitable Life Assurance Society's new headquarters on Seventh Avenue, company officials said yesterday. The building, being completed between 51st and 52d Streets, would house the fourth and largest branch of the Whitney Musuem of American Art as well as a specially commissioned selection of art. Art advisers to Equitable and outside experts said the program would be one of the largest public art installations undertaken by an American corporation in recent years. Equitable officials said that, in significant part because of the art program, they hoped their 54- story building, on the east side of Seventh Avenue, would become an anchor for new development in western midtown. They characterized the $200 million headquarters as a spiritual extension of Rockefeller Center to Seventh Avenue, which has been comparatively devoid of new development for decades.

Because of an editing error, a subheading in a dispatch from Cairo yesterday on Britain's discovery of a mine in the Gulf of Suez misidentified the nations that Egypt suspects may have mined the waterway. They are Iran and Libya. Both have denied the allegations.

Ben W. Heineman, the energetic entrepreneur who heads Northwest Industries, agreed with the company's directors yesterday to a leveraged buyout offer from an investor group that is valued at more than $1 billion. The group - led by Kelly, Briggs & Associates, a Chicago financial partnership, and Oppenheimer & Company of New York - will pay Northwest stockholders $50 a share in cash as well as one share of Northwest's Lone Star Steel Company subsidiary for each share of Northwest common stock. Northwest, a Chicago-based conglomerate, has about 20 million common shares outstanding. Lone Star will be spun off as an independent, publicly owned subsidiary. Sources close to the transaction declined to estimate a potential per- share price for the Lone Star stock.

AMERICANS bought $3.8 billion worth of recorded music last year - not half bad for a music business that saw itself as barely pulling out of a slump. To judge by the crowds in New York's record stores on weekends, who are looking for anything from Cyndi Lauper or the Nubian oud player Hamza El Din to broadcasts of Maria Callas, Jelly Roll Morton piano-roll transcriptions or dance music by Tabou Combo from Haiti, there's a market for all kinds of music. New Yorkers are lucky to have hundreds of record stores to fill their requests, for specialists as well as browsers - stores that can supply rare rockabilly and show tunes or up-to-the-second imported singles. It's easy to while away an afternoon searching for some odd title - and, more than likely, getting distracted by other choices along the way.