What was going on when I was born?

FOR years, two American businessmen - both of them strong, egotistical men who often seemed larger than life - engaged in an exceedingly harsh personal and professional fight that involved elemental issues of personality, class and power. One - the brash, flamboyant Lido Anthony Iacocca - was born to Italian immigrant parents and raised in the industrial town of Allentown, Pa. He arrived in Detroit on the Red Arrow train in 1946, with engineering degrees from Lehigh and Princeton and $50 in his pocket. In 30 years, through a remarkable sense of automobiles and salesmanship, he rose to become president of the Ford Motor Company in a career that could have come from a best-selling novel. The other, Henry Ford II, large, gruff, was the leader of an industrial family that is almost an American dynasty. His grandfather, Henry Ford, had developed the first commercial automobile, the industrial assembly line, the $5 day. The blood of the grandfather seemed to be that of his grandson: both men were autocratic, sometimes tyrannical; given, at times, to making decisions on whim.

MOUTH OF WILSON, Va. FOR most of his basketball playing life, Rodney Strickland has prided himself on making the play. Like any outstanding point guard, his stock in trade has been his ability to see the court, weigh the options and then, in a flash, make the best play with the least effort. But last summer Strickland found himself faced with a set of options that seemed to range from bad to worse. ''I got a call out of the blue from Steve Lappas, my high school coach,'' said Strickland, who had just enjoyed an outstanding junior season at Truman High School in the Bronx. Lappas, now an assistant at Villanova, told Strickland that the player didn't have the cumulative 2.0 (or C) average needed to get into a major college and wouldn't graduate from high school with those grades unless he took one of two drastic measures.

For more than 70 years, seamen from all over the world have found lodging, reasonably priced meals and companionship at the Seamen's Church Institute in lower Manhattan. But the 15-story building the Institute built at 15 State Street in 1968 will be sold.

In ''Protocol,'' Goldie Hawn plays a cocktail waitress who becomes a diplomat. Along the way she gets embroiled in Middle Eastern politics, fights off the amorous advances of an Arab emir and is the cause of a riot in which almost everyone she knows winds up in jail. It seems an appropriate vehicle for Miss Hawn's brand of naive humor and wide-eyed vulnerability. But there is a surprise. The comedy's got a message: Washington is in the hands of corrupt politicians and it's up to the ''little people'' to get it back. This may sound like a thinly disguised morality play, and it is. The film, written by Buck Henry, was conceived by Miss Hawn, who is both star and executive producer. It centers around the United States Protocol Department in Washington, an open field for satire, where questions such as whether or not you can cross your legs in the presence of an African chief are major preoccupations. It paints a little mustache on all the iconography of 80's issues and personalities: politicians, reporters, foreign dignitaries, gurus, homosexuals and feminists.

The civilians in charge of America's space shuttle flights are eager for publicity, but it was always assumed that once the military began lifting payloads into orbit, things would be different. They are.

If the President has his way, the Pentagon's uniformed troops will get a smaller-than-hoped-for raise and its civilian hands will, like other Federal employees, take a 5 percent pay cut. Trims will be made in purchases of certain weapons and ammunition, but big-ticket programs like the MX missile and B-1 bomber won't be touched.

In New York City, in Washington, D.C., in Barrington, R.I., and in many other cities last week, public officials struggled over how, where and whether to display the symbols of the season. In Scarsdale, N.Y., a 6-by-9-foot cr eche was locked away - as it's been since 1981 - awaiting a decision by the United State Supreme Court on whether placing the privately owned religious display in a small public park violates the separation of church and state. Lacking a definitive court ruling, officials tried, not always successfully, to minimize discord over the display of holiday symbols intended to promote peace and good will. In New York, the city's Corporation Counsel ruled that a Catholic organization could place a cr eche in Central Park for the first time in several decades. Two Hanukkah menorahs have been permitted on city-owned land for seven years.

NEARLY 1,000 Nassau County residents will be eating Christmas dinner at soup kitchens and community centers this Tuesday, while hundreds more will receive food donations to feed their families. Although the county is in many ways one of the most affluent in the nation, soup kitchens and community pantries report a dramatic increase in requests for food in the last few years. ''Two years ago there were no soup kitchens in Nassau County,'' said John T. O'Connell, deputy director of the Health and Welfare Council of Nassau County. ''Now there are two, with a third in formation.'' The council, which is a coalition of more than 300 public and voluntary human service agencies, recently published a study entitled ''Hunger in Nassau County.'' The study reported that despite the Island's thriving economy and low unemployment rate, hunger was a growing problem among the county's poor, estimated at 90,000 to 100,000 by the 1980 United States Census.

HUMAN supremacy may be the product of technology, but technology is, in turn, the product of man's fancy, for the story of mankind is the story of Story itself. It was not the thumb, erect posture or the ability to make tools that gave man his start. Apes make tools, as Jane Goodall discovered. I once had a capuchin monkey who had four thumbs as well as a prehensile tail, and could walk as straight as she pleased. She invented the lever and the net, modifying a stick for one and my sweater for the other. A lower primate, she was happy eating flies and had a brain the size of a radish. What got people out of the trees was something besides thumbs and gadgets. What did it, I am convinced, was a warp in the simian brain that made us insatiable for patterns - patterns of sequence, of behavior, of feeling - connections, reasons, causes: stories. We did not arise from the ape with a sharp rock, or even from the one who learned how to sharpen a dull rock, but from the one who saw the connection between sharpness of rock and soon-ness of supper. He pictured himself settling down to eat and made the connection that now would be a good time to go gather some rocks from the stream down below, so they'd be ready when meat waddled by. The Leakey

FOR the first time, elderly homeowners in the state are able to transform the equities in their houses into income while continuing to live in their homes. The Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank of Middletown this month started the first reverse-annuity mortgage program in the state. It is intended to provide money for the elderly who are rich on paper because of the escalation in the values of their homes. At least two other financial institutions are actively considering offering the loans in Connecticut. They are the People's Bank of Bridgeport and an enterprise formed by the American Homestead Mortgage Corporation of Mount Laurel, N.J., and Prudential-Bache

Scientists in charge of research for the Administration's proposal for a defensive shield in space say the immediate plan has been substantially scaled back - from trying to create an impenetrable defense of the nation to protecting the nation's land-based nuclear arsenal. They say the change reflects a realization that, for the moment, the goal of an impenetrable defense is impossible, but they insist it remains a long-range aim. Others outside the Administration who criticized the original proposal contend, however, that the ultimate goal of an impenetrable defense has been tacitly abandoned and a more limited defense has become the only realistic objective. Focus on the First Steps They also say the newly articulated goal raises critical issues of technology, strategy and arms control: By emphasizing protection of land-based missiles, for instance, the program could be perceived by an enemy as fundamentally offensive. Dr. George A. Keyworth 2d, the President's science adviser and a key backer of the ''Star Wars'' proposal, said in an interview that President Reagan's earlier call for a total defense remained an ultimate goal, but had been set aside for the present.

Ornately carved bannisters, stained- glass windows and fine wall moldings may add to the allure of older houses, but are they really better built? And are there problems and limitations that are not readily apparent to buyers? Indeed there are, say architects and home inspectors who continually find that buyers plunge ahead on impulse without taking sufficient care to learn about the special difficulties of older structures. The buyers then feel cheated when expensive repairs are suddenly forced upon them a year or two later, or the adaptations they had planned for the interior cannot readily be made. ''The danger is that they carry a fantasy in their minds that does not always mesh with reality,'' said John Mesick, an Albany architect and former president of the Preservation League of New York State.