What was going on when I was born?

The Manville Corporation, after grappling for 15 years with thousands of asbestos-related claims, yesterday offered to pay victims $2.5 billion in the largest health-related settlement proposal ever made by an American company. The offer calls for Manville to set up a fund to which shareholders would surrender half the value of their stock and the company would give up much of its projected earnings for the next 25 years. To take effect, the offer must be approved by stockholders, unsecured creditors, codefendants and current and future health claimants, as well as a bankruptcy court. Lawyers in the case said the prospects for approval within a year were good.

Montgomery Ward & Company, which pioneered the use of the mail-order catalogue more than a century ago, said yesterday that it would discontinue the catalogue operations because of persistent losses. The move marks an end to an American institution. The Ward's catalogue - the nation's first mail-order catalogue and long a mainstay of rural families - has been in continuous publication since 1872, when it was started by an enterprising sales clerk, Aaron Montgomery Ward. Mr. Ward's effort, at first a one-page flier, drew its inspiration from the flourishing of mail-order sales in the mid-19th century, when the Government lowered postal rates and improved service, in part to ease the isolation of those rural families.

Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders said today that the 1986 Federal budget approved by Congress on Thursday would not shrink deficits by the official projection of $276.2 billion over three years. William H. Gray 3d, chairman of the House Budget Committee, who helped fashion the compromise, said the savings would be closer to $200 billion over three years. The officially projected deficit reduction for 1986 is $55.5 billion, but the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, said the 1986 savings were ''probably closer to somewhere in the $40 billion range.'' Mr. Gray, a Pennsylvania Democrat, agreed. A $50 Billion Difference The Congressional leaders' projections are based on economic assumptions that are considered more realistic than the official forecasts made by the Administration. The more realistic figures indicate that the deficit in 1988 could be as much as $50 billion higher than officially forecast.

Concrete for the 63d Street subway tunnel was mixed and poured on hundreds of occasions with no inspection or testing, in violation of formal industry standards, Federal auditors have found. As a result, there is ''no assurance'' that the concrete in the multibillion-dollar tunnel is safe, according to an interim report by the inspector general of the Department of Transportation. The conclusions in the report were based on an inspection of documents for one section of the tunnel, stretching from Third Avenue to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. The tunnel connects Manhattan and Queens.

A senior aide to President Reagan warmly praised the head of the teamsters' union, Jackie Presser, Thursday night in the first comments about the union leader by a top Administration official since the Government decided not to press embezzlement charges against him. The aide, Edwin J. Rollins, spoke to a conference here of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. ''I want to congratulate you on having that tremendous burden on your head, unjustifiably, for five years, finally put to rest for good,'' he said to Mr. Presser, without directly mentioning the Justice Department and its long investigation. Mr. Rollins, who is the assistant to the President for political affairs, received a prolonged standing ovation from 800 teamsters and family members attending the conference here.

Each morning, at about the same time, although in different places, the two men report for work and find, after months of unrest in South Africa, that their lives have changed, probably irrevocably. One man, Sgt. Joel Msibi, is a black policeman, chased finally from his home in a township near here called Duduza by black youths who firebombed his home three times before he gave up an unequal struggle and left. The other, who asked in an interview not to be identified, is a black teacher who goes to his school each day but finds no pupils there because they, as militant in their own eyes as their peers in Duduza, are boycotting his classes in a township near Port Elizabeth. Altered by the Violence If they have one thing in common, it is that both have been touched and altered by the township violence that the Government gave as its reason for declaring a state of emergency in 36 magisterial districts around Johannesburg's industrial sprawl and in the Eastern Cape. What divides them, however, is their interpretation of youthful revolt that confronts black South Africans increasingly with this question: Are you for the system, or against it? Their stories show, perhaps, that many blacks are caught, their destinies molded by circumstances and conviction, weighing, now, where their niche might lie in a barely discerned future.

A Delta Airlines jet with 161 people aboard crashed and exploded in a fireball last night in a violent thunderstorm as it tried to land at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. At least 122 people, and perhaps as many as 134, were feared dead. Witnesses said the plane - a three-engine, wide-body Lockheed L-1011 Tristar carrying 149 passengers and 12 crew members - was apparently struck by lightning on its landing approach. It nosedived short of a runway, slammed into cars on a highway, struck a huge water tower and burst into flames as its wreckage hurtled across an open field. 'A Big, Loud Boom' At least 121 people on board and one person on the ground were believed killed in the crash, the worst in the 12-year history of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and Delta's first in more than a decade.

There are lines for gasoline, beggars are common, and the national currency is sliding so fast that importers increase prices almost daily. By any measure, Guatemala's ultrafree-enterprise economy, the most powerful in Central America, has fallen into the worst economic depression it has suffered in 50 years. The crisis appears to be the main reason that the army has decided to permit presidential elections in November, ending 30 years of almost unbroken military rule. But the crippled economy is likely to provide an immediate and painful political test for whoever takes office.

The shops in one of the busiest parts of this historic city remain shuttered most of the day. Frightened residents and merchants cower indoors, wondering when the next round of violence will erupt. After five months of bombings, shootings and stabbings that have killed at least 250 people and wounded hundreds more, Ahmadabad is struggling to bring an end to some of the worst Hindu-Moslem and caste fighting in years. Ahmadabad and the surrounding state of Gujarat on India's western coast have long been a prosperous region of textile mills, factories and farms. But the violence has turned the state into a virtual war zone. As former Prime Minister Morarji Desai put it recently, ''Gujarat has gone mad.''

Soon after a new civilian Government was installed in Brazil in March, the three aging men who designed Brasilia were invited to return here to see what went wrong and what can be put right with their 25-year-old project. They accepted with enthusiasm. Having been ostracized by the military regime that ran Brasilia during 21 of those years, the urban planner, Lucio Costa, 83 years old; the architect, Oscar Niemeyer, 77, and the landscape artist, Roberto Burle Marx, 76, immediately blamed the former dictatorship for mistakes in the young city's upbringing. ''We're lucky that all three are still active,'' the capital's new Governor, Jose Aparecido de Oliveira, said. ''Those who say Brasilia was built to be beautiful but not functional are wrong. The military rulers did not try to keep Brasilia alive. They accepted it as a fact but without conviction or enthusiasm.''

An Arab university in the West Bank town of Nablus was ordered closed for two months today by the Israeli military authorities. A military statement said literature encouraging anti-Israeli terrorism was found Wednesday in a search of the school, Al Najah University. The military also said terrorist groups had held rallies on the campus.

An earthquake rocked towns across northern Pakistan today, three days after a quake demolished dozens of houses and killed several people in the same area. Government officials said there had been no reports of any injuries or damage from the latest quake, which lasted less than a minute.