What was going on when I was born?

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1985 The Economy The Consumer Price Index rose last month by the largest amount in more than a year. The 0.5 percent rise was led by a surge in gasoline prices. (Page A1.) Consumer prices in New York and northeastern New Jersey rose 0.2 percent. (D22.)

WHEN most people think of preparing pasta with spring vegetables the ubiquitous primavera sauce comes to mind. At its best, pasta primavera is a wonderful showcase for this season's largesse, including the asparagus, string beans, peas, artichokes and peppers that are spilling out of produce bins. Yet there seem to be as many versions of the dish as there are restaurants and home cooks serving it, resulting in a culinary cliche of towering proportions. Worse, its preparation is often mediocre. In the past year I have foraged through some flaccid and swampy primaveras that made me nostalgic for midwinter stews. One unforgettable rendition combined watery zucchini with cherry tomatoes and stringy celery in tomato sauce; another featured woody (they called it ''al dente'') cauliflower and broccoli in a bog of bland cream sauce. Fortunately, some engaging primavera sauces, or twists on them, which exemplify the dish's versatili

Under this heading, The Times amplifies articles or rectifies what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective. A Washington dispatch on March 20 reported the appointment of Arnaud de Borchgrave as editor in chief of The Washington Times, the three- year-old morning newspaper associated with the Unification Church.

''THE silence, the water, the beauty of the countryside, the sunset and the seagulls, even the fishermen - they all know me now - it's heaven on earth,'' said Monika Dorman, a 45- year-old former figure skater who recently took up rowing on Long Island Sound near her home in Sands Point. Like many others in the metropolitan area and across the country, Mrs. Dorman has discovered the pleasures of a sport, once limited primarily to colleges, that now appears to be growing steadily. The United States Rowing Association in Philadelphia reports that its national membership has doubled, from 6,000 to 12,000, in the last six years. Locally, the Power Ten Club in Manhattan has grown from 27 members at its inception in 1981 to 280 this year, and two groups in the city are trying to open boathouses, which they hope will be open to the public. The reasons for rowing's rising popularity are varied. The fitness boom is one; the lure of the water another, and last year's Olympics in Los Angeles a third. ''The Olympics gave us a tremendous amount of exposure,'' said Allan Borghard, who runs the Sagamore Rowing Club in Huntington, L.I. ''Rowing finally came out of the Dark Ages.''

The General Motors Corporation today reported first-quarter earnings of $1.07 billion, or $3.26 a share, down 33.6 percent from a record income last year of $1.61 billion, or $5.11 a share. Auto industry analysts said that slowing car sales, spending on new product programs and other costs associated with the company's reorganization were responsible for the decline. Harvey E. Heinbach, who follows the industry for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc., said: ''I think there are two different problems here. First, the company is losing market share by not doing the volume of business they should be doing.''

Jacques Delors, chief executive of the 10-nation European Economic Community, said today the United States was unlikely to achieve one of its principal objectives at next week's economic summit conference in Bonn: agreement on a date for the start of a new round of global trade talks. ''For a date to be decreed by a few developed countries would be widely resented in the developing world,'' he told a National Press Club luncheon after a morning meeting with President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Mr. Delors warned that the ''round would fail before it started'' without the ''necessary consensus on agenda and participation.''

WASHINGTON JO ANN SMITH'S favorite meal is standing rib roast, medium rare, with Yorkshire pudding. She also likes fast- food hamburgers, ''the thicker the better.'' In fact, she says, there is no cut of beef that she doesn't like: ''I even fix oxtail soup.'' Talk like this is perhaps to be expected from the 45-year-old Mrs. Smith. She is the president of the National Cattlemen's Association, the first woman chosen to represent the $30-billion beef cattle industry. And one of her major projects for 1985, she said, is to try to convince Americans that beef is healthy. Sitting in the association's Washington office one day in mid-April, she said she realized that many health-conscious Americans associate the words ''red meat'' with such things as obesity, heart disease and cancer. As a result, beef consumption has been declining over the last decade, from 94 pounds per person in 1976 to 79 pounds in 1984. But as Mrs. Smith sees it, beef has gotten a bum rap.

The Storage Technology Corporation, attempting to convince customers that it will emerge from bankruptcy proceedings, yesterday introduced a new high-speed disk drive and said the company would return to profitability by the beginning of next year. The disk drive, the company's first new product since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last fall, is intended to match International Business Machines Corporation's new 3380 models, which are high-speed drives used with mainframe computers. The Storage Technology model will be delivered at the end of 1986, company officials said, about a year after I.B.M. begins shipments of its drives. In an interview in New York yesterday, the company's new management said that the primary importance of the announcement was symbolic. ''Customers are telling us that we have to prove that we are going to be around,'' said Ryal R. Poppa, the corporate turnaround specialist who took over Storage Technology 13 weeks ago. ''We will be around. And now the customer base is beginning to come back, because they want to see us succeed and they want an alternative to I.B.M.''

Digging in its heels for a showdown with T. Boone Pickens, the Unocal Corporation yesterday offered to buy back 28.8 percent of its stock for $72 a share worth of debt securities. The oil company said its offer replaced an earlier one at the same price for 49.9 percent that was conditional on the success of a takeover bid from a Pickens investor group. By assuring investors that a large portion of their shares would receive the $72 offer, Unocal is attempting to make Mr. Pickens's bid of $54 per share for 36.5 percent of Unocal less attractive. Mr. Pickens, chairman of the Mesa Petroleum Company, said at a meeting of Unocal shareholders in Los Angeles yesterday that Unocal had come up with a better offer for the amount of shares its offer involved.

As John M. Richman, the chairman of Dart & Kraft Inc., sees it, Americans have embraced two contradictory fads. On one hand, they are gorging on luxurious, calorie-laden foods as never before. But at the same time, they are becoming health and fitness enthusiasts. Dart & Kraft, the huge food and consumer goods conglomerate, is trying to capitalize on these conflicting trends. It has just bought Frusen Gl"adje, the manufacturer of the creamy, cholesterol-rich ice cream - but it has also acquired Borg, a company that makes bathroom scales for the calorie-conscious. Similarly, Dart & Kraft has purchased Lender's frozen bagels, in hopes of expanding the market for that tasty though heavy bread - but its West Bend division has also bought Precor, a manufacturer of exercycles and rowing machines for those who want to work off the calories from their bagels and ice cream.

Treasury Secretary James A. Baker 3d began reviewing with President Reagan today specific elements of the sweeping tax proposal the Administration plans to submit to Congress next month, according to Administration officials. They said they expected the President to approve most, if not all, of the items in a tax plan before he leaves for Europe April 30. A White House spokesman, Albert R. Brashear, said Mr. Reagan might ''use some of the down time'' while he is in Europe to work out any final details. In any event, the Administration plans to keep his decisions under wraps until after he returns home May 10.

SHIRLEY TEMPLE (b. April 23, 1928) When I was seven I learned that I was EXACTLY one day younger than Shirley Temple And so had more right to be just like her Than anyone else in my tap-dancing class I had a Shirley Temple doll And a Shirley Temple dress I practiced cute songs and coy looks But I had straight hair and knobby knees And no dimples anywhere at all Now I have all the blond curly hair That money can buy And dimples Alas Alas Too many to count MARION ARENAS (b. April 24, 1928) M ORLEY SAFER was walking past the Soviet Union's Mission to the United Nations on East 67th Street on a recent evening. Strolling in front of him, four teen-agers were holding forth spiritedly in Russian. They were dressed, Mr. Safer reports, ''in the standard plumage of their age: that is to say, wearing the international symbols of bad taste.'' He was musing on what they might be discussing so animatedly: Nuclear freeze? The war in Afghanistan? Grain production in the Ukraine? Mr. Safer says he was reassured that Soviet youth are at least as involved as their American counterparts in the issues of the day when the tallest of the boys said: ''Da! Wow! 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.' ''