What was going on when I was born?

''This is probably the most satisfying championship for me. Celtic pride was in this building, but there was a little Laker pride, too.''

At the center of what the authorities have called one of the major spy rings in American history is the troubled family of John A. Walker Jr. It was family ties, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says, that helped Mr. Walker obtain some of the classified information he sold to the Soviet Union. And it was family turmoil, punctuated by a divorce nearly a decade ago, that apparently led to his arrest. Six months ago, Barbara Joy Crowley Walker, who had been left by her husband one year before the divorce, with four teen-age children to rear, turned her former husband in. With her 25-year-old daughter, Laura W. Snyder, Mrs. Walker told an F.B.I. agent on Cape Cod of her suspicions that her husband had been selling secrets to the Russians for about 16 years. Mr. Walker was arrested last month. Then came the arrests of Mr. Walker's son, Michael, a 22-year-old enlisted man aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, and his brother Arthur, a 50-year-old engineer for a local military contractor. A fourth man, Jerry A. Whitworth of Davis, Calif., was also charged in the case.

With its first foray into the United States car market less than a year away, the Hyundai Motor Company is a company in a hurry, pushing its workers to improve the way they build cars. At each stage on its assembly line here hang multicolored diagrams of car parts and assembly techniques, with a large red X marking the wrong way to perform that station's task. The factory in this southern industrial city is strewn with banners calling on workers to achieve 24-hour production and charts plotting the number of error-free vehicles made every day. High Stakes The stakes are high for Hyundai and other South Korean car makers. After years of relative obscurity producing cars for a small domestic market and exporting them mainly to other Asian countries, South Korean companies are getting ready to break into the United States, the largest market of them all.

An article in some editions of Sports Pages on Thursday, about the Mets-Dodgers game Tuesday night, inaccurately described the performance in the eighth inning by Dwight Gooden of the Mets. With the bases loaded, he struck out one batter on three pitches, got the next batter to foul out on the first pitch, then struck out the next batter on five pitches.

The Department of Defense has instituted what the military and civilian medical authorities describe as strict new measures to eliminate substandard care at military hospitals. The drive began after a small number of highly publicized incidents in which patients were killed or injured by negligent military doctors. Some of the most prestigious military hospitals have been caught up in malpractice cases. Internal audits have reported serious deficiencies in the appointment and evaluation of doctors, and a survey of more than 19,000 patients last year found that most families were dissatisfied with military care, ranking it below civilian care in all respects. Leaders Had Resisted The reform effort, fueled by extensive publicity about malpractice cases, is progressing despite initial resistance on the part of some leaders in military medicine, said Dr. William E. Mayer, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.

A headline in Weekend on Friday for a film review of ''The Goonies'' incorrectly indicated authorship of the screenplay. It was written by Chris Columbus and based on a story by Steven Spielberg. A headline in Weekend on Friday for a film review of ''The Goonie

KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR remembered it as if it were yesterday: ''You always remember important things,'' he said. He had just come home from the third grade to his family's apartment in uptown Manhattan, in time to catch the sixth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. ''Gil McDougald was on base and Yogi hit one into the corner and Sandy Amoros turned it into a double play,'' Kareem recalled. ''Then Johnny P. shut 'em down the rest of the way.''

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a maker of computer chips, celebrated last Christmas with typical Silicon Valley flamboyance - a $700,000 employee Christmas party featuring entertainment by the rock group Chicago and a 50-piece orchestra. Six months later, Advanced Micro is making its employees work longer hours for no extra pay and will close its factories for two weeks to cope with plunging earnings and possible losses. It has introduced an austerity program called Staunch, which stands for ''Stress Those Actions Urgently Needed to Check Hemorrhaging.'' The computer industry, long considered one of the nation's bright spots, has plunged into a sudden, deep and unexpected slump that shows no signs of disappearing. Confidence Suffers a Blow The slowdown has proved a rude shock to an industry that has always believed in its own boundless future. Some executives are beginning to suggest that the old days of extravagance may be gone for a long time.

There were a great many Bob Josephs in Brooklyn yesterday. Picnicking in Prospect Park together were a tardy Bob Joseph, a blond Bob Joseph, a Bob Joseph with a broken foot and a female Bob Joseph, whose name was really Roberta. There were two Bob Josephs from Staten Island, two Bob Thomas Josephs, and two Bob Josephs whose fathers were named Joseph Joseph. There was a young service manager from the North American Philips electronics company in Mahwah, N.J., named Bob Joseph, and his boss, the general manager of the company, who also happens to be a Bob Joseph.

An article in Science Times last Tuesday about teachers who speak foreign-accented English incorrectly described an instructor of differential equations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hindustani was his native language; it is not a nationality.

The Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army seized a French Army colonel who was negotiating for the release of 21 kidnapped Finnish United Nations soldiers today, but it later released him unharmed, a United Nations spokesman said. Political sources in Israel said the French Government had put heavy pressure on the Israeli Foreign Ministry to obtain the colonel's release. Meanwhile, Israeli security sources said Gen. Antoine Lahd, the Christian commander of the South Lebanon Army, had told his Israeli Army advisers that he would resign if Israel tried to force him to release the Finnish soldiers without the return of 11 of his men whom his group says the Finns handed over to the Shiite Amal militia Friday. Israelis Support General Israeli leaders indicated in public, and even more strongly in private, that they were backing General Lahd in his conflict with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or Unifil, because they believed the force had acted wrongly by turning over South Lebanon Army members to Amal. Unifil says the men defected.

In the first full week of Congressional hearings on tax legislation, the question raised more often than any other about President Reagan's tax proposal was whether the plan would be too generous to the wealthy and not favorable enough to the broad middle class. Time and again, members of the House Ways and Means Committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, turned to these figures: Taxpayers with total income between $20,000 and $50,000 would receive an average tax reduction under the President's plan of 7.2 percent, less than $200 a year; those with income over $200,000 would have their taxes cut 10.7 percent, more than $9,000 a year. Votes from the middle class are the lifeblood of politicians, and those figures jolted the representatives like an electric charge. About 35 million taxpayers in the United States earn between $20,000 and $50,000 a year. Only about 200,000 households make more than $200,000.