What was going on when I was born?

If Leonard Tose fails to demonstrate within the next six weeks his ability to retire two outstanding loans from a California bank, he may lose his majority ownership of the Philadelphia Eagles, several National Football League executives say. The executives have confirmed that Tose owes the Crocker National Bank of California about $18 million on one note and $12 million on another. He is using his team as collateral for the larger loan, they say, and personal assets, the most valuable of which also is the Eagles, for the other. Crocker, the sources say, has refused to extend Tose more time to repay the loans, which are due in full next January. The bank is also concerned that the net worth of the franchise could decline below an acceptable point. If that happened, the bank would have the option to foreclose on the team, a process that would take about three months and would relieve Tose of control.

''I DEEPLY resent being driven out of Morningside Heights,'' said Michael Jahn, an author of 30 mystery novels and a public-relations specialist. ''I've been here for 18 years - the characters in my book, 'Night Rituals,' are based on people I know from this neighborhood. ''But I can no longer afford to live here and I am going to have to move to a whole new setting - Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn - with people I don't know and a neighborhood I don't know.'' Mr. Jahn will soon be leaving his job at Columbia University and will have to give up a $392-a-month studio apartment in an Upper West Side building owned by the university and rented to its staff. The author said he could not afford to ''spend six months bribing supers to get a $700 or $800 studio - it would mean eating rice and beans.''

EVER since condominium and cooperative ownership gained wide popular acceptance a decade or so ago, owners and their managers have been trying to formulate equitable policies on absentee investors and their tenants. There have been widespread reports of carelessness and abuse by those who rent from nonresident owners in condominiums. And there have been complaints about absentee owners who are concerned only with the appreciation of their units and who refuse to support efforts of resident owners to improve their joint property. ''We've had renters who would keep breaking rules,'' said Stanley Silverman, president of the Cricket Club, a 76-unit condominium in Roslyn, L.I. ''and absentee owners who would complain every time we tried to spend on improvements.''

LAST year, a Wallingford boy who had run away from home was found sleeping in a classroom where he had taken a class for gifted students. He told the police it was the only place where he had ever felt understood. In Ridgefield, a fourth grader who has been identified as being both creatively and academically gifted told his mother that in school he felt like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle because he was always trying to fit in with the other students. In Connecticut, about 15,000 of an estimated 47,000 public school students who are academically or creatively gifted are enrolled in special programs, according to a state panel that studied the subject. This year, an effort is being made to persuade the General Assembly to require public schools to provide programs for all gifted students, starting in the 1988-89 academic year. Sixteen states have such a legal requirement.

WASHINGTON THE Coastal Zone Management Act, the 1972 Federal law that spawned New York State's coastal erosion and tidal wetlands legislation and more than 25 waterfront revitalization projects on Long Island, will be eliminated from the Reagan Administration's fiscal year 1986 budget, according to an Administration official. The Administration will also seek to rescind the act's 1985 grant to coastal states, $2 million of which was earmarked for New York, said the official, who declined to be identified. The Coastal Zone Management Act was instrumental last year in saving the undeveloped Montauk air base from being sold by the Department of Defense as surplus land. A clause in that act prohibits Federal action that might be inconsistent with a state's coastal management plan.

-based auction house, was one of the more intriguing takeover contests of 1983, however trivial it may have seemed in terms of numbers. It pitted a pair of turnaround prospectors, Marshall S. Cogan and Stephen C. Swid, co-chairman of General Felt Industries, a New Jersey carpet and furniture manufacturer, against management of the glamorous Anglo-American institution and its white knight from Detroit, A. Alfred Taubman, a leading developer of shopping malls. Observers wondered what such high-stake players saw, besides cachet, in a business that was losing $4.6 million before taxes on revenues of $80.5 million. A year and a half into the Taubman regime, Sotheby's - now a private United States corporation with twin headquarters in London and New York and 60 offices worldwide - looms large amid the ferment in the once rarified business of art. According to its new owner, Sotheby's, the world's largest auction house, is running in the black once more, a beneficiary of more aggressive marketing and a two-year boom in art and antiques that has seen record million dollar prices at major auctions.

THE European view of the United States suffers chronically from double vision. The perception of the American present is clear and vivid, if seldom free from distortion. In striking contrast, the image of the American past - if it registers at all in the minds of most Europeans - is blurred and indistinct. On the one hand, the senses (not to mention the sensibilities) of Europeans are constantly assailed by the sights and sounds and tastes of a whole range of contemporary American phenomena -- from cruise missiles, high interest rates and apparently nonstop electioneering to Michael Jackson, Billy Graham, J. R. Ewing, McDonald's hamburgers and Coca-Cola. The impact of American power, American products and American popular culture is an everyday fact of life for West Europeans. On the other hand, for the great majority of those same Europeans, awareness of the American past is minimal. There is some vague recollection of dramatic events, such as the Revolution or the Civil War (although the tendency to confuse or conflate the two events lingers on). There is a more vivid picture of the American frontier, built up by prolonged exposure to western films, but that picture is abstract and almost timeless, and largely unhistorical.

Michael Billington is theater critic of The Guardian in London. LONDON The private life of T. S. Eliot has always been shrouded in a good deal of mystery. It is generally known that this St. Louis-born emigre wrote some of this century's most resonant poetry while working in a London bank, was received into the Anglican Church in 1927 and became a distinguished editor with the publisher Faber and Faber. But the young Eliot's dictum that ''Poetry is not the expression of, but the escape from personality'' has acted as a deterrent to biographical investigators and been accepted as the ultimate truth about an impersonal classicist. Two recent events have changed all that and suggested there is a direct link between the public poetry and Eliot's private anguish. One is Peter Ackroyd's acclaimed, unofficial biography of Eliot (published last fall). The other is Michael Hastings's play ''Tom and Viv,'' which opens in New York at the Public Theater on Wednesday and is a slightly re-cast version of the production first seen at London's Royal Court last February.

A month ago, Connecticut came within 6 points of upsetting St. John's, then ranked third. Yesterday, top- ranked St. John's won in a rout, and the difference was essentially the story of the Redmen's success in their last eight games. St. John's, playing at Alumni Hall for the first time since being ranked No. 1 in the nation, imposed its superior size, strength and speed on the Huskies and cruised to a 97-64 victory before a standing-room-only crowd of 6,192. The game was a sharp departure from the Redmen's 57-51 victory over the Huskies in their first meeting. ''They're playing with so much more confidence now and the chemistry is much better,'' said Dom Perno, the Connecticut coach. ''The chemistry wasn't bad then, but now this team has the poise to be successful against any team in the country. And Walter Berry, he fits in like glue.''

For decades, the 85-foot-high Romanesque Revival clock tower on the old Joseph Loth Company building has been a local landmark in Norwalk, Conn. Now the 80-year-old manufacturing facility, which was built as a hat factory and served most recently as an auto-accessory plant, will be converted into 132 rental apartments.

-Occupied West Bank - Israel's economic recession appears to be doing what years of Peace Now demonstrations and political debates have not: slow the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Consider tiny Abir Yaacov. It consists of four families, one dog and four Israeli Army soldiers who stand guard around the clock. The place is so small that late-morning visitors often find no one home. Abir Yaacov was built hastily on July 1, 1984, right before the national elections, and began with 30 families living in tents. But when the Ministry of Housing allocated enough money for just four trailer homes, almost everybody folded their tents and moved back to their apartments in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

THE classified advertisement in a local newspaper read: ''Caldwell - Modern 4 1/2, 2 large BR apt. . . . adults only.'' Size was not a factor, as another advertisement made clear: ''Roselle Park - New 6 rm apt . . . Adults pref (preferred).'' About two dozen classified advertisements that day specified either ''no children'' or ''adults,'' or ''adults'' or ''couple'' preferred. In half a dozen others, only one child was permitted. The advertisements are legal. What is illegal is the actual act of refusing to rent to people with children, except in housing earmarked for the elderly or in owner- occupied single- or two-family dwellings.