What was going on when I was born?

Fifth Avenue is glittering more brightly these days on both sides of the channel gardens in Rockefeller Center. That's because gilders from the company that has been regilding the center's art monuments for half a century have just finished the great panel over the main entrance to the Maison Francaise building and are now starting in on the cartouche and panel over the main entrance to the British Empire building, both on Fifth Avenue.

The hostages spoke with reporters on the Cable News Network yesterday morning when they thought their transfer to Syria was near. The interviews took place in a schoolyard, where the hostages were guarded by militiamen carrying rifles and automatic weapons. Here are excerpts from those interviews: Stewart L. J. Dahl Virginia I think it's calmed down a great deal. It's been a matter of keeping your head together and taking each moment as it comes, weighing each thing. He [Robert Dean Stethem, the Navy diver who was killed in Beirut] was my friend. It was kind of sad. They thought we were marines, combat types. We're noncombat. We were pulled off the plane at the second Beirut landing and we've been safe ever since.

THE Federal Bureau of the Census, which chose this city to test new ways to count noses, has run into unexpected problems, not the least of which is that nothing - not even the Census - takes a back seat to politics here. The test was tried because many urban areas, especially those in the Northeast, complained that 1980 census figures fell short. In 1970, the census reported 260,350 people living in Jersey City; 10 years later, that number had dwindled to 223,532. The bureau picked Jersey City to confront the grumbling and verify its figures by introducing a new two-stage procedure. In early March, residents received short questionnnaires requesting basic information, such as age, race and marital status. This month, 20 percent of those who responded were mailed additional, more detailed questions about occupation, education and income. (In the 1980 census, households received either a long or a short form.) Anticipating that 60 percent of Jersey City's residents would mail back their questionnaires, the bureau expected to get a quick population tally, once census-takers visited households that failed to respond. But only 38 percent returned the short forms.

An internal Defense Department report concludes that security programs at most of the nation's 14,000 military contractors are so weak that they do little to deter espionage. Spying is so easy for employees of most companies, the report says, that ''a supermarket employee may encounter far more difficulty stealing a loaf of bread.'' The 250-page study says the Defense Department should make wholesale changes in its security programs. It does not contain specific recommendations, but it makes the point that the present regulations, even when fully enforced, do not effectively inhibit spying and need to be reconceived.

THE Suffolk County Legislature, which has been battling in the courts with County Executive Peter F. Cohalan over emergency planning involving the Shoreham nuclear power station, appears to be in a central position in deciding whether the $4.2 billion plant will open. Now the debate is likely to turn on the question of whether operation of the reactor at 5 percent of full power, which has been tentatively approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but has been challenged in court, would be reason for the legislators to proceed quickly with approving an emergency plan. Ironically, the legislator who has argued most vigorously that the Shoreham plant poses no threat to public safety has been the first to say that low-power testing makes an emergency evacuation plan for residents around the plant a top priority. ''We would have a nuclear power plant ongoing, and therefore we should have an evacuation plan for the people,'' said Louis Howard, a Republican from Amityville and the Legislature's Presiding Officer. Mr. Howard said he was ''waiting for what I think is the propitious moment'' to bring to a vote a resolution directing the county to participate in an emergency drill for Shoreham.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres said today that the release of the 39 American airliner hostages would clear the way for Israel to free - on its own schedule - the 735 Lebanese and Palestinian detainees it holds. Freedom for the detainees is the Beirut hijackers' principal demand. Speaking to reporters outside his Jerusalem residence, Mr. Peres denied that Israel was a party to any deals for the release of the hostages in return for the detainees. ''No, Israel did not have to make any deal, and did not break any deal,'' said Mr. Peres, who made his remarks before it was announced from Beirut that the transfer of the hostages had been delayed. ''But obviously if the hostages will reach their homes, we won't have the obstacles that we have had until now to proceed with our own way of releasing the prisoners.''

IT was perhaps symbolic that the Justice Department ended its antitrust suits against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the International Business Machines Corporation on the same day. That day - Jan. 8, 1982 - marked the beginning of a new era in which both A.T.&T. and I.B.M. would be more free to compete, not only with their traditional adversaries, but with each other. A.T.&T., which had given birth to the computer era by inventing the transistor, was anxious to flex its technological muscle in the computer business. And I.B.M. was showing interest not only in providing computers to process data, but in providing transmission systems for moving that data from one computer to another. But in the Battle of the Titans, as it has often been called, both contestants have tripped before leaving their corners. A.T.&T., which entered the market with me-too products and lacked the marketing prowess to sell them, has gotten off to a drowsy start in the computer business. And I.B.M., unfamiliar with the players and customers in A.T.&T.'s mainstay businesses, has been equally unsuccessful in the growing telecommunications business.

HOWEVER it ends, the Beirut hostage drama has been the most frustrating episode of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. This weekend was marked by hopeful expectation followed by uncertainty over the fate of the 39 Americans in the hands of Lebanese Shiites. The Administration was expecting the hostages to be freed early yesterday in a move from Beirut to Damascus and then to Frankfurt, West Germany. But a deal was being held up by last-minute Shiite demands for guarantees against retaliatory action by the United States. Beyond this, there were also questions about the seven Americans kidnapped in Beirut earlier, whose release Washington has also been demanding. The growing nervousness in the White House followed a week in which Mr. Reagan struggled to carry on his normal schedule and avoid the siege mentality that gripped Jimmy Carter's White House during the Teheran hostage crisis. Nonetheless Mr. Reagan found himself preoccupied with the Beirut hostages.

EVERY year at this time, as communities prepare for July 4, local histories are dusted off and the county recalls its links with the Revolutionary War. Much of the talk is of George Washington, who spent considerable time here, but there were other generals, as well, including Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, Jean Baptiste Donatien de Rochambeau and Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Tales are told of Thomas Paine, who settled here after the war, and of Lafayette, who made a triumphant Westchester return in 1824. Nobody mentions Benjamin Franklin. ''I've never heard Franklin's name mentioned with respect to colonial Westchester.'' said Susan C. Swanson, the county's historian, expressing a common reaction. But it was, at least once - by Pierre Van Cortlandt, who in 1776 showed an ailing Franklin, then 70 years old, the hospitality of his Croton-on-Hudson manor house, the one now maintained by Sleepy Hollow Restorations and open to the public. At the time, Van Cortlandt was head of the Committee of Safety that governed New York.

''Aditi: The Living Arts of India'' at the National Museum of Natural History, came to this visitor as a delightful surprise - all the more so, perhaps, because I admit to having dreaded it. It is not that I have a prejudice against India - quite the contrary, in fact - but that I blanch at the propect of yet another ethnic export. This I owe to long years of exposure to imported Basque dancers, Bretons in national costume, kilted Scottish bagpipers, flamenco singers from Granada, bouzouki orchestras from Athens, Sicilian puppeteers, recitations of Provencal poetry in the original Oc and yodelers from the Engadine. Touching and authentic as these entertainments can be in their natural habitat, they have a disinherited and fabricated look when sent overseas. The performers try hard. We, the audience, try hard. But something fundamental is lacking, just as it is lacking from the so-called ''game reserves,'' haunt of the sedated lion, with which the owners of English country houses try to drum up tourist trade. ''Aditi'' is two things in one - an exhibition of high-grade Indian painting and sculpture, and a living evocation of Indian village life. Orchestras strike up. Dancers dance. Child acrobats turn themselves inside out. Puppets act out their stories. Magicians magick. Potters pot.

BERNARD SHAW Collected Letters, 1911-1925. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Illustrated. 989 pp. New York: Viking. $45. ''IN the right key one can say anything,'' George Bernard Shaw wrote, ''in the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part of the job is the establishment of the key.'' Like all great comedians, Shaw had a principal key he'd spent much of a lifetime establishing. It permitted him to say perhaps not anything, but surely any number of outrageous things, composed in his own tonality of bright percussive knowingness.

The New York City Opera's 1984 season was an event, with eight new productions, sold-out houses and plenty of critical acclaim. The company was jubilant, of course, but its general director, Beverly Sills, knows better than to start resting on laurels. ''In this business you're only as good as your last note - and in our case, only as good as your last season,'' she said. ''Now another one's coming.'' The 1985 season will open on Friday, offering a crazy quilt of opera and music theater styles and genres. From Romberg's ''The Student Prince,'' which opens the season with five performances over the weekend, to a festival of five bel canto operas, a new production of the musical ''Kismet'' and the New York premiere of Dominick Argento's ''Casanova,'' the season includes operettas, musicals and contemporary operas, as well as standard and not-so-standard operatic repertory. And while the operettas and the musicals are for the most part being played in ''runs'' of several performances of the same work, instead of the usual repertory scheduling, they are considered as much a part of the regular season as, say, ''Turandot'' and ''Lucia di Lammermoor.'