What was going on when I was born?

An article in Business Day on Monday about an apparent fraud involving mortgage-backed securities incorrectly described the status of a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Federal Savings and Loan Association against the Glacier General Assurance Company. It was dismissed Oct. 18 after Pacific Federal, now the Pacific Savings Bank, received a cash settlement from Glacier General.

The American Medical Association called today for ''immediate definitive action'' to combat what it called a national medical malpractice problem of ''crisis proportions.'' In the third and final report by its Special Task Force on Professional Liability and Insurance, the organization proposed legislative and policy actions for itself, for individual doctors and their insurance companies and for the state and Federal Governments. ''It makes no sense for a renowned surgeon in New York to have to pay an $80,000 a year insurance premium to practice medicine,'' the report said, ''It makes no sense for insurance companies to pay more money to lawyers than to injured persons.'' Rise in Cases Is Noted The previous reports noted that Americans were filing three times as many medical malpractice claims as they did 10 years ago, 16 claims for each 100 doctors annually, and were winning record settlements.

The early-warning system of the Parent-Teacher Association of Public School 6 in Manhattan sounded the alarm: ''Variances under attack,'' said a bulletin dispatched to every pupil's home last week. Plans were hatched and forces marshaled. On Tuesday evening, about 100 parents of children attending or hoping to attend the highly ranked public school at Madison Avenue and 81st Street converged on a hearing on whether schools in the district should continue to be able to draw talented children and other pupils from outside the neighborhood. The policy on variances - official exceptions to the requirement that children attend the public school closest to their home - has been a major issue for more than a year in Community School District 2. The district covers much of Manhattan's East Side, from South Ferry to East 98th Street, and parts of the lower West Side and midtown.

The number of civilian complaints against police officers rose 13.4 percent over a four-month period last year, the Koch administration said in a report yesterday. The figures included what the report called a ''most disturbing'' increase in allegations about the use of unnecessary force. The statistics, part of a review of all city services, showed that from July through October, the first third of the current fiscal year, civilians filed 2,501 complaints against police officers. Allegations that police officers used unnecessary force rose to 1,279, an increase of almost 14 percent compared with the same period in 1983.

An article in Business Day on Wednesday about The New Yorker magazine misstated its advertising revenues for 1982 and 1984. In 1982 the magazine's parent company, which also publishes Horticulture magazine and The Cook's Magazine, reported consolidated ad revenues of $46.4 million. Figures for 1984 are not yet available.

A picture caption in The Home Section yesterday, with an article on translators and interpreters, misidentified a translator. The picture showed Jerry Mryglot of Berlitz Translation Services.

DOWNTOWN is never static. Artists, writers, musicians, performers of every kind keep flocking to the place where culture is constantly being made and remade. In a few years, the young and often ragtag innovators who dominate this scene today may have exchanged their lofts and walkups for the places of power and influence, but by then they will have been replaced by the next band of visionaries.

A major Chicago law firm, Lord, Bissell & Brook, told the Wells Fargo Bank two years ago that charges of problems in some of the mortgage- backed securities that the bank was handling ''were incorrect,'' a spokesman for the bank said today. Those mortgages are part of an apparent fraud scheme that has ensnared the Bank of America and, to a lesser extent, Wells Fargo. The BankAmerica Corporation, parent company of the Bank of America, took a $95 million write-off last quarter for losses related to pools of mortgages for which it served as escrow agent and trustee. Many of the mortgages were originated by the National Mortgage Equity Corporation, a mortgage brokerage concern.

Three years ago the American automobile industry was on the ropes, with the Big Three companies reporting a combined loss of $1.34 billion for 1981. Today it wrapped up its best year ever, as the Chrysler Corporation reported 1984 earnings of $2.38 billion, or $18.88 a share, more than triple the $700.9 million, or $5.79 a share, earned in 1983. That brought the Big Three's combined profits for the year to $9.81 billion, easily eclipsing the old record of $6.15 billion set in 1983. The General Motors Corporation earlier reported record earnings of $4.52 billion last year and the Ford Motor Company posted record net of $2.91 billion.

An American journalist, one of five Americans kidnapped in Lebanon in the past year, gained his freedom today, but it was unclear whether he had been freed or had escaped. The journalist, Jeremy Levin, the Beirut bureau chief of the Cable News Network, was reported late this afternoon to have arrived at a Syrian Army base in the Bekaa region. He had been held for 11 months. His captors were believed to be Islamic extremists possibly belonging to the shadowy organization known as Islamic Holy War.

''The two top priorities for us are education and law enforcement.

Harvard University said yesterday that it had sold its holding in the Baker International Corporation because the company refused to give the university information showing it adhered ''to reasonable ethical standards'' in South Africa. The move marked the first time that Harvard, the nation's wealthiest university, had sold holdings from its $1.8 billion stock portfolio under its policies governing investment in companies doing business in South Africa. It also came only two days after another major educational institution, Stanford University, voted to sell its holdings in Motorola Inc. if the company made any further sale of communications equipment to the South African military or police. For years, both Stanford and Harvard have resisted pressure from their faculties and students to adapt broad divestiture policies. Yesterday, officials on both campuses said that stance was unchanged, and that the actions against Baker, an Orange, Calif., maker of pipeline and mining equipment, and Motorola were acts of ''last resort.''