What was going on when I was born?

LAST January Wayne Meisel walked 1,500 miles between Maine and Washington, D.C., stopping at 70 colleges and talking to students, faculty members and townspeople about involving undergraduates as volunteers in community improvement. Looking back now, he sees his journey as ''an act of desperation''; he had begun to doubt that he could muster the support and money he needed to turn his idea into a national reality. Today, his operation, the Campus Outreach Opportunity League, or COOL, has an office, a modest staff and a budget because of a $17,500 grant from the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, a small philanthropy in New Haven. Such grants to young orgnizations without proven records are relatively rare. Most foundations prefer to give money to well-established institutions or to scholars and scientists connected with those institutions.

Until three months ago, the A.J. Canfield Company was little more than a small, albeit successful, soft-drink bottler in Chicago. Then came the Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda craze, and things at 61-year-old Canfield's have not been the same since. In mid-January, Bob Greene, a syndicated columnist for The Chicago Tribune, extolled Canfield's 2-calorie Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda as the perfect foil for his chocolate habit. ''Taking a sip of the stuff is like biting into a hot fudge sundae,'' Mr. Greene wrote.

The Reagan Administration, removing a thorn in relations between the United States and Japan, has agreed to give a new Japanese air-cargo carrier, Nippon Cargo Airlines, permission to serve the United States, a senior Administration official said today. The decision, which ends a 14-month controversy, is expected to be announced Wednesday in Bonn at a meeting between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe of Japan. Both are attending the seven-nation economic summit meeting. Progress in Trade Talks The agreement, which also contemplates expansion of passenger airline service between the two countries, came as a senior American trade negotiator reported progress in talks with Tokyo to open Japanese markets in telecommunications and other sectors where there are barriers against imports.

A front-page article yesterday about the Atlantic Richfield Company's restructuring misstated the charge the company will take against earnings.

ONE morning recently a shopper paused at the frozen juice section in a large new supermarket in Danbury, Conn. Most of the juice concentrates were packaged in familiar short round cans made of paper and foil with metal lids. One brand, however, came in a plastic container with a pop-off top. With only a moment's hesitation the shopper reached for it. Why? ''When I get up in the morning I don't have time to spend on breakfast,'' she explained. ''I just pull off the lid, set the plastic can in the microwave, and after a few seconds the juice is ready to pour into the blender.'' The scene illustrates one major reason for packaging and processing innovations that, according to manufacturers, are changing the ways Americans buy and prepare their food: convenience, in both packaging and food preparation. The availability of new plastic packaging materials makes it possible to present food in containers that are lighter-weight, easier to handle and less fragile than ever before. Thus far, it has had little or no effect on how the products taste, but that could change in the future.

Dr. Emil Dolensek traced a meandering path through the network of holding pens, the recovery room and the high-ceilinged operating theater of the new Animal Health Center that opened yesterday at the Bronx Zoo. It is a building full of amenities, for both humans and animals. But Dr. Dolensek's attention was riveted for the moment on a simple mechanism that he had developed and that makes it possible to guide a very large animal from surgery to the recovery room to a cage and rest. ''That's one good thing about having 15 years to think about what kinds of things an animal hospital ought to have,'' said the doctor, the center's chief veterinarian, recalling the years that he had worked in the zoo's old, cramped relic of a hospital that was the nation's first animal hospital when it was built in 1916.

The sun had just risen behind the twin-spired city cathedral today when high-stepping troops and rumbling Soviet tanks began their parade down the Street of April 30 to mark a decade of Communism in what was once known as the Republic of South Vietnam. The procession started almost exactly at 7:52 A.M., the hour 10 years ago when a helicopter carrying the last American and South Vietnamese evacuees rose from the roof of the United States Embassy when this city was called Saigon. Today, as jets flew overhead and the ranks of soldiers, sailors, militiawomen, militiamen, factory workers and students passed by, the scene at first suggested a strictly Kremlin-inspired occasion. Nine members of the ruling Politburo, including Prime Minister Pham Van Dong and Le Duan, the Communist Party leader, sat on the reviewing stand among military officers and foreign Communist or fraternal delegations. But then a local band on the sidelines broke into Vietnamese rock and down the street came roller skaters and a motorcycle club, strutting children and a small sea of women in the brightly colored traditional tunics called ao dais.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether an investor group headed by T. Boone Pickens, chairman of the Mesa Petroleum Company, violated Federal securities laws that govern insider trading, fraud and timely disclosure of takeover plans, Mesa said yesterday. The Pickens group, Mesa Partners II, is currently locked in a takeover battle with the Unocal Corporation for control of the California oil company. A Federal judge in California said last Thursday that Unocal would ''probably be able to prove at trial'' that the Pickens group had violated the law in February when it said its original holding of Unocal stock was for investment purposes only. Analysts and securities lawyers said it was still too early to tell if there would be any impact on Mr. Pickens's takeover attempt from either the S.E.C. investigation or further court action stemming from lawsuits filed by Unocal. In active trading yesterday, Unocal's shares gained 62.5 cents, to $46.375.

A dispatch from Rome last Thursday on the naming of 28 new cardinals by Pope John Paul II misstated the ethnic origin of Bishop Jozef Tomko. He is a Slovak.

The Republican-controlled Senate narrowly approved the White House budget package today, giving a symbolic victory to President Reagan as he left for the economic summit meeting in Bonn. The package is still open to amendment, and it became clear today that to win final Senate approval, it would have to be changed significantly. The House also took up a hotly partisan issue today, voting down a Republican proposal for a special election to fill the disputed seat from Indiana's Eighth District. [Page A22.] Budget Vote Is 50 to 49 Today's Senate vote of 50 to 49 culminated a week of lobbying by the majority leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, who wanted to give the compromise budget momentum by beginning the debate with a yes vote on the package as a whole.

The Government's main index for predicting changes in economic trends registered a small but unexpected decline in March of two-tenths of 1 percent, the Commerce Department said today. Analysts described the fall in the index of leading indicators as somewhat disconcerting after other recent reports of meager economic growth in the first quarter and an upturn in inflation. The department also said the United States trade deficit in March was $11.1 billion, or 3.5 percent less than in February. The improvement was less than many economists expected. [Page D5.] Another report said that factory orders fell nine-tenths of 1 percent and that the durable goods component plummeted 3 percent, not 2.3 percent, as first reported last week. [Page D19.] Bigger Drop Probable The report on factory orders meant that the composite index of leading indicators would probably be revised to show a drop greater than two-tenths of 1 percent.

''Transforming the South into a Socialist society will always be our first objective.'' - Mai Chi Tho, chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee. [A6:2.]