What was going on when I was born?

The Manville Corporation said yesterday that it had tentatively agreed to a plan that could clear the way for billions of dollars of payments to asbestos victims and help the company emerge from bankruptcy proceedings. Lawyers for some of the asbestos victims hailed the decision as a breakthrough in the complex dispute. ''Manville has never before been willing to agree on an acceptable financial package, and seems willing to do so now,'' said Robert J. Rosenberg, a lawyer who represents some of the plaintiffs in the case. Curtis Linke, a Manville spokesman, said that the proposal agreed to by senior management requires the approval of the company's board of directors. The board met yesterday and was expected to conclude its consideration of the plan today. Any agreement also would have to be approved by a number of other parties, including a bankruptcy court.

Two companies that say they help students raise their scores on College Board examinations, in some cases by hundreds of points, have been temporarily barred from using material from the tests themselves. The order restraining the companies, pending further hearings, was issued by Judge Maryanne Trump Barry in Federal District Court in Trenton at the request of the Educational Testing Service, which adminsters the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The testing service charged in court Tuesday that one company, Princeton Review, and a smaller company, Pre-Test Review, used questions improperly taken from ''secure'' tests not intended to be in the public domain. At issue are the tests, taken by 1.7 million high school students a year, that often determine which students are admitted to the country's leading colleges. And, as more students have sought coaching in recent years, the debate has grown over what effect such aid can have in raising scores.

TO many people, a pop song equals four catchy minutes of truisms about love. Since the 1960's, however, many songwriters have decided to circumvent the cliches. Dark lyrics with light tunes, character studies from bizarre points of view, irony, alienation, paradox and the whole Pandora's box of literary distancing devices have moved into pop - and that's not to mention the musical twists. Formula songwriting isn't dead, but it's no longer the only game in town. This weekend brings three songwriters to New York who have private agendas for this most public of forms. Graham Parker, who will lead his band, the Shot, tomorrow at Pier 84, channels political and personal outrage into songs about, among other things, religious zealots and nuclear holocaust. The East German singer Nina Hagen, who will perform tomorrow at the Beacon Theater, tears into songs with a multifarious voice and a willingness to throw just about anything into the mix. And the British songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who is returning tonight to Irving Plaza, writes snappy little fantasies about insects, people with ''lightbulb heads'' and other aberrant images - all encapsulated in formally perfect pop songs.

The Federal Reserve Board today denied Citicorp permission to buy a bank in South Dakota that is involved in the insurance underwriting business. The decision amounted to a ruling that bank holding companies cannot lawfully enter the insurance industry, under Federal law as it reads now. Under South Dakota law, banks chartered by that state are permitted to engage in all aspects of the insurance business. South Dakota is the only state with such a law. The bank that Citicorp wanted to buy is the American State Bank, of Rapid City.

Sakowitz, the fashion specialty store that has catered to the tastes and foibles of generations of wealthy Texans, filed for protection from creditors today under Chapter 11 of the Federal bankruptcy law. One of the last great family-owned department store chains in the United States, the 83-year-old company cited troubles in the oil and gas industry as the main reason for the action. The chain had grown rapidly in the late 1970's and early 80's to 11 major department stores and 6 boutiques in Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona, during the great oil boom that ended abruptly in 1982. In retrospect, that expansion was a mistake, said Robert T. Sakowitz, the 46-year-old chairman and chief executive in an interview shortly after his lawyers filed the bankruptcy papers. ''One of the strategies we employed was to follow the natural-resource industry,'' he said. ''We would go to places we thought were recession proof.''

A crowd of people carrying hammers and crowbars pried the metal seal off an abandoned city-owned building this week in the East New York section of Brooklyn and said it now belonged to them. It was the 25th building in East New York that the squatters, organized by a group called Acorn, had broken into and claimed since June 15. Members of the group said they planned to ''take'' as many of the section's other 2,500 abandoned city-owned buildings as they needed to solve what they called their housing crisis. ''We're entitled to decent housing and we're going to have decent housing even if we have to take it,'' Louise Stanley shouted through a bullhorn to the cheering crowd outside 412 Vermont Avenue on Wednesday night.

The Ford Motor Company, continuing the Big Three auto makers' trend toward diversification into financial services, announced an agreement today to acquire the First Nationwide Financial Corporation, which owns the nation's ninth-largest savings and loan association. Ford said it would pay $32 a share in cash for all of First Nationwide's stock, making a total value of $493 million. At present 81.4 percent of First Nationwide's shares are held by National Intergroup Inc., which has agreed to the transaction. Howard M. Love, the chairman of National Intergroup, said the thrift unit was being sold because it had been retaining its earnings to finance growth rther than paying dividends.

Dr. Elliot M. Gross, New York City's Chief Medical Examiner, was formally served yesterday with charges of professional negligence or incompetence. State officials refused to release details of the charges, expressing concern about their possible effect on a pending criminal case. ''There is a concern about the potential impact on the criminal-justice process and we share that concern,'' said Peter Slocum, a State Health Department spokesman. ''We're not unmindful of other interests than the Health Department's.''

The New York State Department of Education said yesterday that several medical schools in the Caribbean and Mexico could no longer send medical students to complete their clinical training in New York teaching hospitals. The move would effectively prevent most of the students and graduates of the schools from entering the medical profession through training in New York, according to state education officials. They could, however, seek their training and licensing in other states and later practice in New York. Only one of the 20 or so medical schools in the Caribbean and Mexico, the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, received approval from the Education Department to send medical students to New York hospitals.

The nation's first commercial synthetic fuels plant, which has supplied natural gas derived from coal to millions of consumers in the Middle West for a year, was scuttled yesterday as uneconomic. Energy analysts said the move means the virtual abandonment for this century of the 1970's goal of independence from imported oil. The five partners involved in the plant, which is located in Beulah, N.D., announced their decision to abandon it yesterday in a letter to the Department of Energy. They said they could not afford to continue operations without further Government financial support.

Forty years after abject wartime defeat, Japan is grappling with its peacetime role as a world power. It is amply proud - detractors would say smug - about its economic might, but it also knows that its success has made others edgy or outright angry. It is almost obsessed with the thought of itself as unique. Yet self-consciously, it measures virtually every accomplishment against those of other countries, from the size of its gross national product to the prowess of its home run hitters. Its people boast in more expansive moments that the next century will belong to them. Then in the next breath they retreat to the safety of the tattered cliche that theirs is a ''resource-poor island country,'' hardly carved out for such a grand role.

International The House voted economic sanctions against South Africa by a vote of 380 to 48, but final action on the measure was delayed until September after Senate opponents threatened a filibuster. Administration officials said President Reagan would veto the legislation. [Page A1, Column 1.] 11 West European nations recalled their ambassadors in Pretoria for consultations in a signal of displeasure over the violence and arrests in South Africa. [A4:4-6.]