What was going on when I was born?

He paused for just a moment near a granite column and gazed into the swirling snow. Then, for the last time as Lieutenant Governor, Alfred B. DelBello strode quickly away and the Capitol faded gently into a shroud of whiteness. Today was Mr. DelBello's final day as New York's second-highest elected official - a day of reminiscing, a day of marching with the Rockettes on a picket line, a day of reflection on government and governance. ''I don't think I'll miss it in toto,'' Mr. DelBello said, taking a tug on his ever-present pipe. ''I've done everything I could possibly do. The bureaucracy tends to get in your way. To get things moving is impossible, it's so slow.''

The Economy President Reagan will propose a 1.5 percent spending rise in the budget he will send to Congress Monday, according to Administration officials and budget documents. That would be the least growth in two decades and bring outlays to $973.7 billion. (Page A1.) The index of leading economic indicators fell 0.2 percent in December, and the November gain was revised sharply downward. Most economists, however, insist that the economy is likely to keep thriving this year. Some say the index is flawed. (D1.)

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1985 International A space-based defense plan has won increasing support among Americans, according to Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Testifying at the start of several weeks of hearings on foreign policy, Mr. Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who appeared later, said the long-range plan was crucial to the stability of the strategic relationship with Moscow and held open the possibility of reducing the threat of nuclear war. (Page A1, Column 1.) Ships delivering arms to Ethiopia have apparently been given priority over ships bringing food to famine victims, according to aid officials and Western diplomats in the capital, Addis Ababa. (A10:3-4.)

JAZZ pianists in styles ranging from ragtime to stride to be-bop can be heard this weekend up and down Manhattan, in surroundings from the spectacular to the mundane, accompanied by food for the gourmet or for the snacker or nothing more than a drink. The city's jazz piano rooms may be as high in the clouds as the 107th floor of the World Trade Center where Windows on the World offers a spectacular view of Long Island or down to street level at Broadway and 10th Street where the view from Pizza Piazza focuses on pedestrians peering in windows with Grace Church in the background. They include jazz musicians' hangouts, such as Bradley's on University Place where the centerpiece - or, more literally, the cornerpiece - is a piano that belonged to the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, or the Carnegie Tavern, behind Carnegie Hall, where both performers and audience gather before or after the concerts there. A piano-fest this weekend could include a world-famous jazz celebrity, George Shearing. Although Mr. Shearing was born in London, he is a New York jazz product. His fame stems from his arrival here almost 40 years ago. It was in New York that he organized the quintet with which he gained stardom in 1949 and it was while he was playing at Birdland, a 50's club named for the saxophonist Charlie (Yardbird) Parker, that he composed his best-known piece, ''Lullaby of Birdland.''

The index of leading economic indicators, which is intended to predict the nation's economic course, fell two- tenths of 1 percent in December, the Commerce Department reported today. This small but surprising decline left the index barely above its August level. At the same time, the department revised sharply downward the index figure for November. It also made negative revisions for October and August.

In the last year, Donald J. Trump has bought the St. Moritz Hotel, opened a huge gambling casino in Atlantic City, taken over the largest tract of undeveloped land in Manhattan, offered to build a $250 million sports stadium in Queens and the world's tallest building in Manhattan, and signed the country's leading college quarterback, Doug Flutie, to play for his football team. Yesterday, Mr. Trump announced that oil had been discovered off 72d Street on his large undeveloped tract - the site of the old West Side rail yards. ''Isn't it amazing?'' Mr. Trump said. ''It's a classic major oil find in Manhattan.''

THERE has been no doubt whatever throughout the last 25 years that Frank Stella, born in 1936, is the strongest American painter of his generation. He laid claim to that title with the black paintings that Dorothy Miller showed in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the winter of 1959-60, and despite one or two divagations either into sweetness or overcomplication, he has held on to it ever since. ''Strong'' is in general a compliment - no one wants to be called the weakest artist of his generation - but sometimes it has overtones of bullying that have nothing to do with great art and are likely to be antithetical to it. Art history is full of painters who came on strong and left little but sound and fury behind them. The point of Frank Stella is not that he is strong, but that at his best he has something important to be strong about. The pictures in question may seem for a moment to be about the esthetics of provocation, but the longer we live with them the more we realize that they deal with a compound idiom whose time has come.

High in the Andes of Peru, explorers have examined and photographed in great detail the remains of a legendary ''lost city'' that archeologists believe may rival the spectacular Inca ruins at Machu Picchu. The ruins of vast walls and terraces, buildings and tombs and statuary, all perched on the steep, cloud-shrouded eastern slope of the Andes overlooking a nameless river, were presumably a major center of an early, resourceful and mysterious people whose civilization flourished long before the glory days of the Incas. American and Peruvian archeologists, excited by the prospects of making important discoveries about a previously unknown culture, announced plans yesterday to return to the remote jungle site next summer to begin comprehensive studies that could continue over the next 15 years. The announcement was made at a news conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

A news analysis article in Metropolitan Report last Friday about Ariel Sharon's libel suit against Time magazine incorrectly described the handling of a poll on Senator Barry Goldwater by the publisher Ralph Ginzburg. The poll was not fabricated. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found in 1969 that Mr. Ginzburg had tampered with the poll results, printed misleading versions of the responses and added material he had actually written himself.

The General Dynamics Corporation, the nation's largest military contractor, has not paid any Federal income taxes since 1972, although the company reported more than $2 billion in profits during that time, according to company documents and Congressional staff members. Between 1979 and 1983, the company paid its shareholders more than $100 million in dividends. Unlike most other corporate dividends, the payments by General Dynamics were not taxable to shareholders. While General Dynamics has been allowed to defer payment of more than $500 million of taxes from previous years, it has also accumulated more than $3 billion in tax losses which can be carried forward to the year 1998. Thus, the company appears to have a possibility of paying no taxes for some years into the future.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who will leave her United Nations post in March, said today that she was convinced that her views had been ''misunderstood'' and distorted by key Administration officials. But she said she was buoyed by diplomatic and personal accomplishments over the last four years. ''I was a woman in a man's world,'' she said. ''I was a Democrat in a Republican Administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot. People projected around me.''

Sharp increases in the value of the American dollar are exacting a heavy toll from the nation's farmers, from merchants and bankers in many rural towns and from the industries and workers that produce farm supplies. The hidden cost of the increased value of the dollar arises, agricultural economists say, because a stronger dollar makes American goods more expensive abroad and reduces foreign demand. In turn, surplus farm commodities that remain in this country lead to lower prices for the consumer and lower income for the farmer. Nationally, the experts say, this cost now amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. Just for producers of corn, wheat and soybeans, the toll has grown to a current annual rate of $4.42 billion since 1983, although some of that has been offset by Government farm programs, according to one new study.