What was going on when I was born?

Firefighters found the bodies of six people today in the charred rubble of a radical group's house that had been leveled in a police assault that set fire to the surrounding neighborhood and destroyed more than 50 homes. Mayor W. Wilson Goode, saying he was ''devastated'' by Monday night's destruction, said the city would rebuild the houses gutted by the blaze, which left 200 people homeless. He defended the action against Move, a radical back-to-nature group, which had had a 90-minute shootout with the police nearly 12 hours before a bomb was dropped from a helicopter. Mr. Goode indicated that he would approve such a bombing again in a similar situation. Bodies Not Identified None of the dead found in the rubble of Move's row-house fortress in West Philadelphia could be identified this evening. Officials said there were two men, one woman, a fourth adult whose sex could not be determined, and two children, one of them a girl.

''The whole world sees us. We've got to stick together. We'll have homes again.

Bond prices rose sharply yesterday, as investors snapped up Government securities in the belief that a cut in the discount rate may be imminent. Market participants said that trading was heavy throughout the day. ''Everybody seems to want to buy,'' said one government securities trader, who asked not to be identified. ''There was a stampede into the longer end early in the day, with the front end catching up rather handsomely later on.''

Morgan Stanley & Company, as expected, announced today that it had assembled a group of 25 investors to offer to purchase the Government's 85 percent interest in Conrail for $1.2 billion in cash and other considerations. Its investor coalition ranged from the CSX Corporation and Citicorp to Harvard, Princeton and Columbia and several major pension funds. The Morgan Stanley group, said its proposal, if accepted, would be an interim step toward making at least 60 percent of Conrail's stock available to the public within five years of the date of purchase. Morgan Stanley said the total value of its offer to the Government could be as much as $1.8 billion. The figure was based on Government receipts that might accrue from an independent Conrail as opposed to the carrier becoming a subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation, which the Reagan Administration picked in February as its choice to purchase Conrail.

It has been a while since the name John W. Hinckley Jr. was news. His father, John Sr., who is more comfortable being called Jack, very much liked it that way. So did Jo Ann, his mother. They agree that for a long time they abhorred the notoriety that dogged them, linking ''the very name Hinckley with unpleasantness,'' Mr. Hinckley said. But now both of them are going public in a big way. ''There is no way we can undo what happened,'' Mr. Hinckley said, speaking of the day in March 1981 when his son shot President Reagan and three other men. ''So we're trying to do the next best thing,'' his wife said, ''to make something good come of it.''

A picture caption yesterday with an article about the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario gave an incorrect location for the National Theater named for him. It is in Managua.

Retail sales climbed nine-tenths of 1 percent last month, the Commerce Department said today. The report was greeted by the Reagan Administration and some economists as an encouraging sign that the economy is reviving after a sluggish first quarter. With a rebound in demand for automobiles, retail sales rose to a seasonally adjusted total of $112.2 billion in April after a seven-tenths of 1 percent drop the month before. The March decline represented a revision from an earlier report that put the fall at a much steeper 1.9 percent.

Every weekday morning at about 7:15, Michael J. Del Giudice gets what he describes as ''my wake-up call.'' The caller is Governor Cuomo, an early riser who has read, reacted to and frequently fumed over the morning newspapers and now is ready to map out the governmental day. Much of Mr. Cuomo's day will be carried on in public, a speech perhaps, a news conference or one of the Governor's ubiquitous radio or television interviews. Mr. Del Giudice's day will be all but invisible. In his shirt sleeves, he will sit in his spacious office a few steps from the Governor's, making crabbed little color-coded notes at meetings, murmuring into the telephone.

Two women and three children were sitting on a cot, clinging to one another in the Red Cross emergency shelter. Their cries of anguish filled the room. The once-tidy row houses on Osage Avenue, where the family had lived, were nothing but rubble and wisps of smoke. Milton Williams, one of at least 150 people in 45 families who were suddenly left homeless by the destruction, tried to comfort and encourage the weeping women and children.

In the face of the Reagan Administration's commitment to roll back foreign penetration of the American steel market, imports have continued to rise, prompting Congress and the industry to voice fresh concern. It would appear that the Government has made progress. With Japan's signature today, the Administration has reached agreements on limiting shipments with countries that produced more than three-quarters of America's imported steel last year. Accords have been reached with Australia, Brazil, Finland, Mexico, Spain, South Africa, South Korea and the European Common Market. And one American negotiator has described as ''practically in the bag'' additional agreements with Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. Negotiations are in various stages of progress with Argentina, Austria, Sweden and Venezuela.

The rededication of Lewisohn Plaza at City College turned out to be a family reunion yesterday as the distinguished descendants of Adolph Lewisohn, the philanthropist, gathered for lunch and reminiscences. Everyone remembered when Lewisohn Plaza was Lewisohn Stadium, a sprawling athletic field and Doric-columned amphitheater where thousands of New Yorkers paid as little as 25 cents apiece to listen to symphonies on summer evenings. Many of Mr. Lewisohn's relatives attended the dedication of a bronze bust of Mr. Lewisohn and a plaque commemorating the plaza and the old stadium.

The Pentagon says it is beginning to act more like a private business as it spends record sums to buy goods and services. Nevertheless, its critics in Congress are drafting legislation to force it to move further and faster toward such standard commercial practices as competitive bidding and monitoring how much labor a particular weapon needs. From a fiscal perspective, the debate is more important than ever. Of President Reagan's $329 billion, four-year buildup in military spending, $191 billion, or more than half, has gone to research and development or buying weapons. Those accounts now represent 47 percent of the military budget, the highest such proportion since World War II.