What was going on when I was born?

Because of an editing error, an article in some copies of Sports Pages yesterday about the University of Washington football team misstated its pre-bowl ranking in a news-agency poll. It was ranked third by United Press International but fourth by The Associated Press.

Under this heading, The Times amplifies articles or rectifies what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective. An article on the Washington Talk page on Dec. 19 attributed a table of ''convoluted phraseology'' to Donald G. Groves, a staff scientist with the National Material Advisory Board.

A picture caption yesterday with an article about an Ernest Hemingway manuscript misidentified a publishing company official. He is Charles Scribner 3d, executive vice president of Charles Scribner's Sons.

The first comprehensive statistical portrait of Americans aged 85 or older is emerging from new research on the elderly. This group, called by various scholars the old old, the oldest old and the extreme aged, numbers 2.6 million and is growing more rapidly than any younger segment of the population. Until recently little studied by social scientists and virtually unrecognized by governmental decision makers, the group amounts to 1.1 percent of the population, according to the latest estimate, for July 1983. The findings underscore concerns about the toll of the chronic multiple illnesses, the poverty and the widowhood suffered by some in the over-85 population. But the research also indicates that, as a group, those 85 and older are less frail, less likely to be institutionalized and more independent than previously believed.

DR. BRUCE FADER, a psychiatrist, and Kim Brown Fader, an editor, may still work in Manhattan and often socialize there on weekends. But from Grand Central they are only half an hour by train from the arugula, watercress, bok choy and bibb and Boston lettuce growing in the heated greenhouse of a large house they recently bought in the Park Hill area of Yonkers. On the acre of land around their home the couple have planted an orchard of dwarf fruit trees and a vegetable and fruit garden. After looking for about five years for a suitable dwelling for their family of five in New York, the Faders discovered an enclave of large, late-19th- and early-20th-century houses in what Dr. Fader calls ''a pocket of cheapness.'' The Faders paid $140,000 for a 5,000- square-foot house that has an 18-by-30-foot library, an adjacent 15-by- 15-foot reading room and a 15-by-30-foot living room, besides its land and greenhouse. There is, of course, work to be done in the 1894 structure; they have started refinishing the elaborate woodwork of the staircase themselves. ''We're trying to do things the inexpensive way, which takes more time,'' Dr. Fader said. ''But in two or three years we'll be living in a mansion.''

Prices for future delivery of crude oil and heating oil plunged on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday, as oil traders predicted that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would be unable to prevent prices from crumbling further. The prices were the lowest since crude oil began trading on the exchange in 1983 and heating oil began trading in 1978. The dramatic drop in prices was the first clear reaction by the market to the OPEC conference last week in Geneva, and reflected doubts by many analysts and traders that the conference achieved anything. In the first trading day since the conference ended Saturday, the price of crude oil to be delivered next month fell 49 cents a barrel, or more than a penny a gallon, to $25.92 a barrel. Virtually no crude oil traded hands yesterday in the spot markets, but if similar prices reign there they would be the lowest since the revolution in Iran pushed prices up at the end of 1979.

A.G. Edwards & Sons, the biggest brokerage house based outside of New York City, has managed to do quite well far from the Wall Street crowd - and it believes its distance from that canyon is one of the main reasons. Benjamin F. Edwards 3d, the company's often irreverent 53-year-old chairman and chief executive, said that by being so removed, A.G. Edwards had not felt the pressure to follow the herd. In that way his brokerage, the nation's seventh largest in total brokers, has avoided many of the costly fads that others have followed in recent years. ''Being here in St. Louis, we have fewer temptations to keep up with the Joneses,'' said Mr. Edwards, whose great-grandfather, Gen. Albert G. Edwards, founded the firm in 1887. ''We don't have people across the street telling us, 'Gee, you're dumb for not cleaning up on this thing when everyone else is.' ''

-resolutions man knocked on the back door the other day. ''How many can I put you down for this year?'' he asked. His warehouse of discount resolutions is famous: secondhand 84's and 83's - even some vintage 82's - snapped up from the original owners minutes after they were first broken. The firm is called the Best of Intentions Ltd. ''No sale this time,'' I said. ''But I hoped you'd come so we could exchange a word about New Year's resolutions.''

Sgt. Lee J. Adams, riding shotgun on a state police airplane circling over Interstate 84 here, had his eye on a dark blue, subcompact sedan passing a van 400 feet below. ''I got one,'' Sergeant Adams said as he punched the button in the plane's cockpit when the car passed a white line painted on the highway. As the car passed another white marker a quarter mile away, he punched the button again, and digital numbers flashed on a computerized timing device showing the car's speed as 71 miles an hour. Within minutes, the plane's pilot, Sgt. Robert L. Maslan Jr., had radioed a description of the car to a state trooper in a chase car below, and the driver was pulled over and given a ticket for speeding.

ALTHOUGH she spent 12 years in New York City public schools, Debra J. Wilson reads about as well as the average fifth grader. She is 33 years old, has three children and has been on welfare, she said, ''for umpteen years.'' She yearns to change her life, and she thinks that learning to read is the key. ''I want to get off welfare,'' she said. ''I don't like sitting home waiting for checks. It's boring at home. I'm just sleeping my life away.'' Mrs. Wilson decided that she could qualify for a decent job only if she learned to read proficiently, so she signed up for a course in adult basic education at La Guardia Community College, not far from her home in Rego Park, Queens. Then she waited - for a year and a half. ''They said it's a long waiting list,'' she recalled. This month, if all goes according to plan, Mrs. Wilson will finally begin classes. ''Not being able to read has hurt me,'' she said. ''If I can go back to school, I can better my life.''

Crocker National will report a $215 million loss for the fourth quarter, and $324 million for the year, among the biggest ever for an American banking organization. Loans to agriculture and real-estate ventures played important roles, the chairman said. Midland Bank of London, which controls Crocker, covered the loss by making a $375 million infusion of funds. (Page D1.)

In an unusual move to buttress the shrinking Government fund that insures savings and loan deposits, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board has told the industry that it is likely to impose a special assessment on thrift institutions to raise as much as 1 billion. Because of money paid to depositors in failed savings associations or to assist troubled thrift units, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation's resources fell in 1984 by at least 300 million, and perhaps as much as $500 million, to about $6 billion. It was the first net loss in the agency's 50-year history, bank board officials said today. The three-member bank board manages the insurance fund. According to the bank board, as of Oct. 31, 1984, the nation's 3,169 savings and loan associations and savings banks held $760 billion in insured deposits.