What was going on when I was born?

IF there is no feast of outdoor sculpture this summer, there is also no famine. This is the year in which the widely acclaimed Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum opened in Long Island City. And the controversy over Richard Serra's ''Tilted Arc,'' in Federal Plaza, has probably focused more attention on public sculpture than ever before. The outdoor sculpture this summer is strong in two directions. One is political. There is challenging work by Vito Acconci, David Finn and Dennis Adams that is determined to focus attention on particular social issues or on the message of the media in which issues and desires are presented and defined. There is also a flourishing body of sculpture that is constructed and architectural, yet filled with a broad range of content. As much as the political work, the large, constructive sculptures by artists like David Seccombe and Elizabeth Egbert exist outside the gallery and museum system.

Nine women have been attacked at knifepoint -five of them sexually assaulted - in five midtown Manhattan office buildings since June 11, and the police said yesterday that they were searching for one man in the case. Of the attacks, all in elevators between 1 P.M. and 6:30 P.M., four took place in buildings that are among the busiest and best-known commercial towers -two in the Chrysler Building, 405 Lexington Avenue at 42d Street, and two in the Pan Am Building, 200 Park Avenue, at 45th Street. Seven of the victims were robbed of their money and jewelry. In the two other instances, the women screamed and the man fled without robbing or injuring them.

At the Cemetery of the Heroes in a quiet corner of this former capital of Portuguese Timor, new rows of simple white headstones on the graves of fallen Indonesians offer silent evidence that a decade-long guerrilla war is not yet over. For most Timorese now under Indonesian rule, life has begun to improve materially, the countryside of this island in the eastern Indonesian archipelago has been largely peaceful and the number of political detainees has dropped sharply. It is 10 years since Portugal abandoned its impoverished territory to civil conflict. The subsequent sudden and, by most accounts, brutal invasion by Indonesia brought world attention to this remote corner of the western Pacific and prompted international condemnation of Jakarta. Today people are still meeting violent death in East Timor's barren hills. They are victims of a conflict that even the guerrillas' supporters say they cannot win, but one that the Indonesian Army has not been able to end.

A dispatch from Jerusalem last Thursday on the conviction of 15 Jewish settlers for terrorist acts against Arabs said a suspect in one case, Era Rappaport, fled Israel before the trial began and was being sought by the Israeli police. Mr. Rappaport, who holds American and Israeli citizenship, is reported to be living in the New York area. Although the Israeli Government has not filed formal charges against Mr. Rappaport or asked for his extradition, the Israeli police say he is wanted for questioning about a bombing in 1980 that maimed two mayors in the West Bank. The article should have noted that Mr. Rappaport has maintained, through his lawyer and other associates, that he did not flee Israel, and that he has been living openly in the United States since his arrival. Page D1

The Economy The economy grew at only a 1.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said. That was much slower than estimated a month ago and follows a first-quarter gain of merely 0.3 percent. Commerce Secretary Baldrige predicted a second-half expansion at roughly a 4 percent rate, but some analysts were less optimistic, chiefly because of a big inflow of imports. The slow growth suggests new difficulties in the already stalemated efforts to reduce the Federal budget deficit. [Page A1.] Industrial output rose only 0.1 percent in June. [D2.] The Fed will not try to lower the dollar as a way to ease the trade deficit, its chairman, Paul A. Volcker, told a Senate committee. A strong dollar helps finance the $200 billion Federal budget deficit, which he considers more important. [D2.]

JUST by happenstance, two noteworthy shows of African art have opened this week, at two different institutions. They're interesting not only for their subject matter, which is engrossing enough (and not unrelated), but also because they illustrate two very different approaches - one traditional, the other innovative - to the presentation of work that is at once art and anthropology. The traditional presentation is ''The Art of Cameroon'' at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street (through Oct. 15), and the innovative one - as might be guessed from the title - is ''Sets, Series and Ensembles in African Art,'' at the Center for African Art, 54 East 68th Street (through Oct. 20). The Cameroon show is a dazzling display of ''royal'' art, focusing on the Grassfields area of what is known officially today as the United Republic of Cameroon, in west central Africa. With one of the continent's richest art traditions, the Grassfields - a high, verdant plateau that borders on Nigeria - is a complex of tribal chiefdoms, each ruled by a hereditary king or Fon together with a group of titled dignitaries. The tribal art, as explained in the show's handsome catalogue by Tamara Northern, curator of ethnographic art at Dartmouth College's Hood Museum, was primarily made for the Fon and his nobles, and is intended to express their power and prestige.

In a tumultuous and puzzling trading session yesterday, the credit markets ignored fresh statistics showing a weak economy and low inflation and pushed short- and long-term interest rates up sharply. As rates moved up, prices plummeted more than 2 points, or $20 per $1,000 face amount, for some long-term Treasury issues. This performance was a sharp surprise to many market participants. They had expected higher prices and lower interest rates to follow the Commerce Department's announcement of a weaker-than-expected 1.7 percent growth rate for the gross national product during the second quarter, compared with the 3.1 percent estimated last month. The second quarter's 2.8 percent inflation rate was another reason traders had expected bond prices to remain steady or rise.

Smithsonian Institution buildings housing some of the nation's most treasured heirlooms will receive an emergency inspection after the discovery that electrical transformers in several of them may be leaking hazardous chemicals, officials said today. The Environmental Protection Agency, the officials said, will inspect 57 high-voltage transformers in seven museums and an administrative building where polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB's, are used as coolants. PCB's have been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals and, if set afire, could contaminate the museum collections. In 1977, manufacturing of PCB's was banned in the United States.

United States intelligence officials, in a revised assessment of a Soviet missile known as the SS-19, now believe that it is too inaccurate to pose a threat to American missile silos, Reagan Administration sources said today. The new appraisal, which differs from assessments by the Pentagon, is contained in a secret report, the National Intelligence Estimate, which is prepared once a year by the Central Intelligence Agency and represents the consensus of intelligence experts. Administration sources said that the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency dissented in a footnote to the document and stood by earlier estimates of the missile's accuracy. The purported capacity of the SS-19, an intercontinental ballistic missile, to destroy United States missile silos has been an important political factor in American arms control considerations and in the campaign to build an American counterpart, the MX.

The Sunrise Savings and Loan Association of Boynton Beach, Fla., which had grown spectacularly in recent years by lending heavily to construction projects, was taken over and declared insolvent today by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. The board said it had replaced the board of directors of the $1.5 billion institution, brought in new management and formed a new institution under the same name to acquire all of Sunrise's assets and liabilities. The new institution has a mutual savings charter, while the former unit was a state-chartered stock association. The bank board also said that the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation would issue promissory notes to the new thrift institution to insure it was financially solvent. It did not specify the amount.

Seeking to put to rest a persistent and disruptive rumor, the new chief of the International Business Machines Corporation's personal computer group said yesterday that no replacement for the company's four-year-old basic PC was in the works. The PC II is a ''mythical product,'' declared William C. Lowe, who three months ago became president of I.B.M.'s entry systems division. He added that reports about a PC II had hurt the company's personal computer sales, although he termed those sales ''strong'' despite the general industry downturn. Separately, the computer giant said that a faulty Texas Instruments chip in thousands of its year-old PC-AT units could cause the machine to ''crash,'' or suddenly abort its operations.

International The U.S. will weigh Israel's views, but it will not give it a veto over whether American officials should meet with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian group to set the stage for eventual peace talks with Israel, Washington said. [Page A1, Column 1.] The assessment of Soviet missiles has been revised in Washington, according to Reagan Administration sources. They said that intelligence officials had shifted their thinking about the Soviet SS-19 missile and that many officials, differing with the Pentagon, now believe that the six-warhead missile is too inaccurate to pose a threat to American missile silos. [A1:3-4.]