What was going on when I was born?

THE SICILIAN By Mario Puzo. 410 pp. New York: Linden Press/ Simon & Schuster. $17.95. High in the hills of Sicily, in an ancient castle overlooking the sea, the Duchess of Pratoameno was sitting alone in her salon sipping tea when suddenly the splendor of her afternoon was interrupted by a young gentleman who, after bowing to kiss her hand, casually informed her that he and his fellow bandits had surrounded her castle and would not be leaving until she had surrendered to them all of her jewelry, including the large diamond ring that adorned the finger he had, seconds before, so tenderly touched. With indignation, the duchess refused. But as he persisted in a manner both polite and menacing, the duchess, reasoning that her personal well-being and that of her family was surely worth more than her possessions, finally acquiesced, pleading only that she be allowed to keep her ring. ''It is the engagement ring given me by my husband,'' she explained, ''a memory of my youth and of our love.'' Deftly removing the ring from her finger, the bandit replied, ''Knowing this will make me treasure it even more.''

A Federal jury tonight found Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, not guilty of libeling the Rev. Jerry Falwell in a parody advertisement accusing the evangelist of drunkenness and incest but awarded him a total of $200,000 in damages. The jury ruled there was no libel because the advertisement's claims, published in the sexually explicit magazine, were too outrageous to be believed. But it said Mr. Falwell, who is head of Moral Majority, was entitled to $100,000 in actual damages for emotional distress and to $100,000 in punitive damages for what it said was a malicious parody. Mr. Flynt's lawyers said they planned to ask Federal District Judge James C. Turk to set aside the award and said they were prepared to appeal to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.

Arab hijackers holding a Kuwaiti airliner at the airport here freed 39 more hostages today, but still retained 18, including two Americans and three Kuwaiti officials, diplomats and the Iranian press agency said. The hijackers said they would ''keep the guilty ones'' and reportedly threatened to put the Americans on trial. At one point today, according to the Iranian press agency, one American, identified as Charles Kipper, told the control tower that the hijackers wanted to end the crisis peacefully. ''Please meet their demands because they are serious,'' he was quoted as having said. ''Please prevent further killings.''

This year had all the makings of the best of times for the American Broadcasting Companies. An enormous number of people were glued to their sets when ABC telecast last summer's Los Angeles Olympics, kicking off two months of glory as the top-rated network in prime time. ABC reaped the record revenues and profits that a No. 1 Nielsen rating usually entails. But the year's promise has all but fizzled. And when ABC's top executives went before the board of directors of their affiliated stations last week in Maui, the accolades were intermingled with tough questions about strategy.

THERE are two Jerry Krawczyks at the Michaelian County Office Building in White Plains. One, a 37-year-old, 200-pound bearded Eastchester resident in jacket and tie, works on the first floor as a program analyst for the Office of Employment and Training. The other, a 19-year-old, 170-pound, beardless Port Chester resident in combat fatigues, is a portrait hanging on the wall of the second-floor Bridge Gallery. The younger Jerry Krawczyk fought in a war in a tiny Southeast Asian country, a conflict that, 18 years later, the other Jerry Krawczyk can't forget. ''I look at that picture and I'm back there, as if it were yesterday,'' Mr. Krawczyk said of a photograph taken in 1967. It shows him and other members of his outfit, India Company, Third Battalion, Third Marine Division, crossing a stream in Vietnam. ''You never lose what's in your mind. You can almost go back and see the terrain and you can almost remember what you were doing that day.'' But there are Westchester residents, he suggested, who do not remember, or do not want to remember, Vietnam. And there are others who have a distorted impression of the men and women who were stationed there.

The recreational project, to be known as Port Regalle, will occupy part of a 20-acre site between Nelson and Wiman Avenues less than a mile from the Gateway National Recreational Area and Great Kills Park. It is being built by the Great Kill Development Company, whose owner, Michael Miley, bought the waterfront property last year for $1.7 million.

It was more than a matter of a developer's taste that lead to a distinctly residential flavor for the design of an office complex to be built next year in Westport, Conn. The building site at 1089 Post Road East is within Westport's Business Preservation District, where the zoning code requires that homes demolished for commercial construction projects be replaced with residential-looking structures.

A plan to convert a former utility structure in a residential section of Ridgewood, N.J., into condominium apartments has lead to a bitter dispute between the local developer and nearby residents who hold that the project violates zoning laws and would irrevocably alter their single- family neighborhood. A group of homeowners has hired a lawyer in an effort to block David Bolger's plan to put 36 units into the 26,735-square-foot Tudor- style utility building and a 18,500-square-foot wing he would build. Mr. Bolger, who bought the former Public Service & Gas building at auction for $679,000, must persuade local officials to rezone the parcel from a nonconforming use to an R5 zone - the highest density permitted in the village for apartments. A special public hearing on the matter is scheduled for tomorrow evening and the Ridgewood Council is expected to rule on the zoning request early next year.

Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In 19th-century Russia, ''Anna Karenina'' was received with the following: ''Vronsky's passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna'' . . . ''Sentimental rubbish'' . . . ''Show me one page,'' says The Odessa Courier, ''that contains an idea.'' ''Moby-Dick'' was incinerated: ''Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before in marine literature'' . . . ''Sheer moonstruck lunacy'' . . . ''Sad stuff. Mr. Melville's Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.'' By this measure, ''Huckleberry Finn'' (published 100 years ago this week in London and two months later in America) gets off lightly. The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse Norman Mailer's latest novel is ''Tough Guys Don't Dance.'' than ''a gross trifling with every fine feeling. . . . Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,'' and the public library in Concord, Mass., was confident enough to ban it: ''the veriest trash.'' The Boston Transcript reported that ''other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.''

The chemical that leaked from a Union Carbide insecticide plant in India, killing and injuring thousands of people, is not essential to the production of the main product of the plant, a Union Carbide spokesman has acknowledged. The spokesman, Stephen K. Galpin Jr., said that until 1978 Union Carbide made Sevin, the main insecticide produced at the plant in Bhopal, using a process that did not involve methyl isocyanate, the poisonous chemical that leaked from a storage tank at the plant Monday. In addition, Union Carbide has told its plants in West Virginia, Georgia, Brazil and France to use up their stocks of the chemical as quickly as possible, a process that officials said would take two to three weeks. A spokesman, Laura Malis, said yesterday that the company had not decided whether to continue its use after current stocks are gone.

After investing heavily in microcomputers, public schools in the New York metropolitan area are finding that they are still far from achieving the academic revolution expected from the new technology. Interviews with students, teachers, principals and others disclose that most schools use computers mainly to teach computer literacy - teaching about the computers themselves. Relatively little is being done, they say, to exploit the potential to teach other subjects in a more efficient, interesting or effective manner. ''Everybody is talking about where we should be,'' said John V. O'Farrell, principal of Walt Whitman High School in Huntington, L.I. ''But the reality is that no one is there.'' Education officials say the shortcomings of computers as learning tools in New York City and its suburbs are similar to the problems teachers are having across the country. A recent national study found that computers in high schools are used two-thirds of the time for computer literacy.

Behold the modern chicken.It's seven weeks old, weighs about 4.1 pounds, has a plump body and skinny legs, and is fast becoming one of America's most popular animals. This year each American is expected to eat, in assorted forms, a striking 54 pounds of chicken meat, double the consumption of 20 years ago. That's more chicken than ever, and in more new renditions: chicken franks, chicken sausages, chicken patties, Chicken McNuggets, chicken baloney, chicken loaf, chicken pastrami. ''The bird is hot,'' proudly declares William Roenigk, the director of economic research at the National Broiler Council. ''The country is switching away from beef and toward poultry,''