What was going on when I was born?

THE 117th college football season opens this week like many of the recent campaigns - in an atmosphere of suspicion and scandal. Three of the stronger teams are serving punishments for violations in recruiting some of the athletes who helped them earn national rankings. Southern Methodist University will start its season Sept. 7, just three weeks after receiving one of the most severe penalties ever dealt a football program by the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Committee on Infractions. Florida and Illinois are also serving probations for recruiting violations. The Mustangs, the Gators and the Illini are preseason selections to finish among the top 10 teams in the nation. Clemson, the No. 1 team for the 1981 season, entered last season as a contender again for the No. 1 ranking as it was serving a probation period that ended last November.

ARISE in the number of people who operate businesses and professions in residential cooperatives and condominiums is creating problems for boards of directors. Active offices in both city buildings and suburban complexes can generate an unwelcome increase in foot and motor traffic and an additional security risk. They also can add to the noise level, place an unacceptable burden on the electrical supply and increase wear and tear on hallways, lobbies, lawns and other public areas. Controlling these operations can be tricky, but those who counsel boards on such matters or have been through the experience themselves suggest that it can be done if certain steps are taken. These include carefully documenting alleged violations of house rules or bylaws that result from office activity before making any allegations, taking action immediately rather than letting months slip by, and amending the rules to specifically regulate enterprises likely to cause the problems.

President Reagan, commenting on his planned meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, said today that he hoped to eliminate ''hostilities'' and ''suspicions'' between the two countries. In presenting that goal for the meeting, Mr. Reagan also played down the likelihood of signing major agreements. Similar expectations have been advanced by top White House officials who have discussed the Administration's preparations for the meeting, which will be held in Geneva on Nov. 19-20. Mr. Reagan's remarks came in a telephone interview with Dick Doty, executive vice president and news director of Washington Broadcast News. The interview will be broadcast beginning on Monday, and the White House is to make a transcript available then.

The price farmers get for beef cattle has fallen sharply this year, but little of the saving has been passed on to shoppers, according to Government statistics. The gap between the farm price and the retail price has reached a record amount, bringing protests from cattlemen and prompting Gov. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska to order an investigation by his Attorney General. Representatives of the food marketing business assert, however, that comparisons are misleading because of a lag between the time cattle are sold for slaughter and the time the meat arrives in the stores. A Farmer Is Puzzled On a farm of about 20,000 acres here in eastern Kansas where Trent Burkdoll and his three brothers raise and fatten about 4,000 head of cattle, Mr. Burkdoll said he was puzzled. ''It seems to me,'' he said, watching his brother Mark and his son Clint herding cattle across a wide pasture, ''that the question folks in New York ought to be asking is this: Why, when we are losing $100 a head on some of those cattle, are the stores still charging so much?''

BEFORE mammoth rejuvenation projects like Manhattan's Battery Park City ignited building booms and changed cityscapes in the nation's downtown areas, it seemed that a deadly cancer was spreading unchecked through the body of urban America. Only a few years ago, major metropolises were facing financial ruin. Aging industrial slums and dilapidated residential neighborhoods had a choke-hold on inner cities, discouraging development. And much of corporate America, complaining about crime and the poorly educated urban labor force, fled to the lush greenery and superior schools of the suburbs. Manhattan's downtown financial district was as battered by these forces as most others. But now, major corporations like Merrill Lynch, American Express and Dow Jones, will soon begin moving into Battery Park City, the bold renewal project that is adding a new dimension to Wall Street. The phoenix-like rising of their collective new home is demonstrating that predictions of lower Manhattan's demise were unduly hasty - like forecasts for other downtowns across the nation.

WHEN Bruce Springsteen stepped onto the stage at Giants Stadium for his recent record-breaking series of six concerts, the guitar he held was, like the Boss himself, a New Jersey product. Unlike the singer, who was born in Freehold, the guitar was not a native of New Jersey. But, said Mike Batlan, a member of the Springsteen crew, its neck and fingerboard were customized by Phillip J. Petillo. The 39-year-old luthier, whose workshop is in the basement of his home in this Monmouth County community, learned the art of instrument-making from men in their 80's when he was a teen-ager. It is, he says, a dying art because most of its current practitioners are more interested in fast money than high-quality instruments.

LAURA MINOR, a leader of the abortion rights movement in Bristol, would rather there was not going to be a referendum on abortion in November's local election, but she thinks some good might yet come of it. ''It's time for people to start discussing this issue,'' she said. She said a friend of hers went into a bar last week in Bristol, a central Connecticut industrial city of 58,480, and asked the men sitting near her their feelings on abortion. ''At first, there were not too many comments,'' Mrs. Minor said, ''but before long there was a rip-roaring discussion on the whole issue.''

Suddenly, the Yankees' bats have turned uncharacteristically quiet. Tonight, they mustered just two hits but still came away with a 4-3 victory over the Seattle Mariners, primarily because they were able to make the most of seven walks. Six of the free passes were handed out by Mark Langston, the Seattle starter, who didn't get past the fourth inning. His relief help came from Roy Thomas, who retired 15 of the 16 batters he faced. The Yankees did not get a hit over the final five innings.

IF a Manhattan apartment can be home to one, it can be home to two. At least that's the way an increasing number of New Yorkers see it as they take in roommates to split the bills and keep themselves company. Although precise figures are hard to come by, some roommate-finder services report a big jump in business over last year. In 1983, the State Legislature passed a law allowing renters to take in unrelated roommates. But owners of roommate services say it is the shortage of moderately priced apartments, rather than the so-called ''live-in-lover'' law, that has spurred their business.

''Novelists are like vultures,'' the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa once said. ''We feed off decaying societies.'' His simile explains a great deal about the dilemma of American creative artists in the 1980's. Two generations of writers, film makers, musicians and visual artists have come of age since World War II ended. Born into comfort, most of them, these creators now live in a decade that is the apotheosis of affluence, the time when, as the novelist Jay McInerney put it, ''there's no cultural consensus beyond the idea that a Porsche or a Rolex are considered legitimate goals in themselves.'' In their own material ease, and in that of the milieu they often convey, postwar artists stand in contrast to their peers in more turbulent countries and to their forebears in America, who were shaped, indeed defined, by the national cataclysms of two world wars and the Great Depression. The earlier American artists had poverty and political upheaval to stoke their furnaces; today's artists admittedly live amid less want and unrest and rarely recognize their existence at all. That is not to say the equation is simply experience equals art; but it does mean that, in the absence of great, galvanic events, these artists must find other means and subjects to stir their passions.

JANIE THOMPSON had no idea that her song would become so big. She never would have predicted that it would inspire a video that football fans would desperately want to buy. She has spent 30 years on the campus of Brigham Young University. She has been there more than long enough to know that Provo, Utah, is hardly a place where football followers would behave in a manner usually reserved for spots such as Pittsburgh, or Miami, or Iowa City, or Norman, Okla. Last week was Education Week, when the summer students had departed and the planning for the fall had not yet started, when citizens were invited to attend free lectures. As part of the weeklong program, visitors were given a choice of four musical productions to attend each evening. And at the end of the production her family performed, Janie Thompson thought it would be nice to present the video created for the song she wrote during the 1984 season. Her lyrics, matched to several songs from the musical ''Mame,'' immortalize the players who won the nation's top ranking and chide the cynics who claimed the Cougar schedule included Bo Diddley Tech.

A hodgepodge of old factory buildings in downtown Red Bank, N.J., where military uniforms were turned out from the Civil War until the end of World War II does not seem a likely candidate for conversion into a vibrant new commercial center. But when Elaine and Theodore Sourlis look at this property they envision a mixed-use commercial center of offices, shops, art galleries and restaurants where space will be so attractive it can be sold as condominiums rather than rented.