What was going on when I was born?

THE $1 million worth of outbound automobile engines seized by Federal marshals at the port of Houston a few months ago looked like new products off the General Motors production line. They were even packaged in what appeared to be G.M. boxes. In reality, they were counterfeit engines taken from cars in junkyards and painted to look new. ''There is counterfeiting that leads to theft and there's counterfeiting that leads to murder,'' said Joseph Dawson, spokesman for the Federal Office of Consumer Affairs. ''I hate to think of what could have happened if those shipments had not been seized. I hate to think of all the shipments out there that have not been seized.'' ''It's one thing to talk about counterfeit Izod shirts, they don't result in harm to your body,'' said James Bikoff, president of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, a San Francisco-based association of 300 companies. ''The same doesn't go for counterfeit brake linings, hospital heart pumps and drugs,'' all of which, he said, have been sold in the United States, all of which ''can kill you.''

The leading combat commander of the Salvadoran Army and three other senior officers died today when their helicopter crashed in a rebel-held area. Their deaths appear to be the most significant setback the Army has suffered in five years of war here. An army spokesman, Lieut. Col. Ricardo Cienfuegos, said at a news conference tonight that the commander, Lieut. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, died at about four o'clock this afternoon near the town of Joateca in Morazan Province, 120 miles northeast of the capital.

Excerpts from one report, page A6. MANILA, Wednesday, Oct. 24 - The five-member panel investigating the killing of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. said Tuesday that it had unanimously rejected the contention of the military that Mr. Aquino had been shot by a lone gunman hired by Communists. Rather, the commission said, Mr. Aquino's death resulted from a military plot. But, after an inquiry lasting almost a year, the panel split over how high in the chain of command responsibility should be placed. As a result, the panel said, it was issuing two reports on the investigation.

Buried in the trade bill that President Reagan is expected to sign in the next few days are several provisions that experts say mark a coming of age for service exports. The bill gives services, long the poor cousins of goods in international commerce, equal status in several critical areas. The provisions in the bill, and path- breaking discussions that the United States is holding with Israel and Canada to liberalize trade in services bilaterally, are viewed as a breakthrough for service exporters. They have been lobbying hard for the changes. ''Over the next three years we'll see more bilateral agreements on services, as with Israel. In the longer term, three to five years, there'll either be new codes or changes in the codes or new agreements on the multilateral front,'' said Harry Freeman, a senior vice president of American Express, a major trader in services.

An article Oct. 17 about grants by the J. Paul Getty Trust to four Los Angeles cultural institutions misidentified Earl A. Powell 3d. He is director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A dispatch from the United Nations on Thursday about an Iranian challenge to Israel's seat in the General Assembly misstated the positions taken by African governments. Twelve supported Iran's move, 17 opposed it and 21 abstained or were absent.

A WOMAN visiting New York from Palm Beach, Fla., last week walked into the Sherry-Lehmann wine shop on Madison Avenue at 61st Street and told a clerk she was looking for a ''quality bottle of red wine at a good price'' to take to a dinner party. A half hour later she tumbled into a taxi with a case of C^otes du Rh^one, two bottles of Gaja Barbaresco, a bottle of Ch^ateau Meyney from Bordeaux and three different California chardonnays. This impulsive shopper learned what many wine lovers already know: New York City offers some of the best wine bargains in the country right now in a buyer's market that may be the most exciting in years. People shopping for hearty, full-flavored wines to enjoy during the fall and winter will find that stocks are up and prices down in wine shops all over town. The seemingly relentless surge of the United States dollar abroad and bountiful harvests in France, Italy and Spain have made imported wines a bargain hunter's dream.

Manhattan court officers wore surgical masks and gloves yesterday as jury selection began in the murder trial of a 34-year-old man who has AIDS, the immune-system disease for which there is no known cure. The defendant also wore a mask, and a clerk covered her nose and mouth with a yellow legal pad in an apparent attempt to prevent contracting AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome. At the start of the session in State Supreme Court, the City Health Commissioner, Dr. David J. Sencer, explained to 125 prospective jurors they did not have to fear contracting AIDS from the defendant, Eddie Coaxum.

Attorney General William French Smith said yesterday that while the Federal Government had achieved ''its greatest successes ever'' against traditional organized-crime groups, ''new crime cartels'' from Asia were spreading to the United States. Mr. Smith was the first witness to testify as the President's Commission on Organized Crime opened three days of hearings that will focus principally on Chinese and Japanese crime groups that the commission said had emerged in New York and other major cities. The commission heard testimony from six law enforcement agents and from two disguised undercover witnesses - dressed in monklike hoods and robes - about the activities of new Chinese factions in the United States and Canada that have apparent links to long-established criminal groups in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The agents testified about secret Chinese organizations known as triads, which they said compelled new members to drink human and chicken blood at initiation rites and to swear loyalty oaths to their leaders. Disloyal members are punished by being crippled or are assassinated, the agents said.

It is four days before the New York Marathon, just about the time when all the 18,365 entrants have decided on their prerun diets. To hear the runners tell it, many will be eating and drinking a bewildering variety of things in equally bewildering combinations. Most marathon runners, in keeping with current wisdom, will be eating mounds of pasta, bread and rice as they try to load their systems with slow-burning carbohydrates, according to Dr. Gabe Mirkin, an authority on sports medicine and the medical editor of Runner's World. This is not quite what Sheldon Barash has in mind. He will eat more beef than usual, as well as pasta - more than at any other time during the year - and will abstain from milk, which means ''no ice cream at all two days before Sunday.''

Orders for durable goods, an indicator of future production and employment, fell by 4.3 percent in September to their lowest level in 11 months, the Commerce Department reported today. However, most of the decline from August resulted from the automobile strike last month and a sharp drop in the volatile military equipment orders category. Total orders fell from $102 billion in August to $97.6 billion, the lowest level since October of last year. Shipments of durable goods also fell, from $101 billion, their highest level of the nearly two years of the current recovery, to $99.5 billion. Industry's backlog of unfilled orders slipped three-tenths of 1 percent, to $348.1 billion.

A news conference called by a coalition of Christian and Jewish leaders to condemn ''the ideology of nuclear Armageddon'' turned into an abrasive exchange on religion in politics today when leaders of the religious right interrupted with charges that the speakers were subjecting President Reagan to an unfair test of faith. Among those condemning the nuclear Armageddon theory repeatedly spoken of by Mr. Reagan were the Rt. Rev. Thomas Gumbleton, the Auxiliary Roman Catholic Bishop of Detroit; Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue of New York, and Jim Wallis, an evangelical pastor and writer. They were confronted by leaders of Moral Majority, the conservative religious lobby; Paul Weyrich, leader of several conservative causes, and other secular and religious figures. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of Moral Majority, sent a statement denying he ever predicted a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The debate that emerged centered on whether the beliefs of Mr. Reagan and his fundamentalist supporters regarding Biblical prophecies on the end of the world were a proper issue for the 1984 Presidential campaign. The news conference was called in a small hall of the Washington Hotel to publicize a statement signed by 100 religious figures who have been active in the antinuclear movement. They asserted that the religious right had adopted a theology under which ''they conclude that reconciliation with America's adversaries is ultimately futile.''