What was going on when I was born?

THREE years ago, Edward S. Finkelstein was riding high. As chairman and chief executive of a resurgent R. H. Macy & Company, he was heralded widely for transforming a drab and sluggish company into the nation's most dramatically successful department store chain. His ''merchandising miracle,'' as some dubbed it, had turned New York's largest department store into a model for department stores everywhere and seemed to change the face of American retailing. His strategy was bold and expensive. He tried to lure growing legions of young, affluent and fashion-conscious customers with chic merchandise, abundant inventories, and heavy discounting. And he did so dramatically: On the showroom floor, he injected a touch of theater into the routine of retailing. But in the last year, Ed Finkelstein's triumph at the 127-year-old company has begun to falter. Now, the industry's creative guru may be fighting the toughest battle of his career.

Ralph Kramden read, or at least bought, The New York Herald-Tribune. He and his wife, Alice, previously thought to have been childless for their entire 15-year marriage, once adopted a baby girl. Edward L. Norton survived as an ''engineer of subterranean sanitation'' in part because he had no sense of smell, and, though he tried to hide it, his middle name was ''Lillywhite.'' These are not the only startling revelations to emerge from the ''lost'' episodes of ''The Honeymooners,'' which, after languishing for 30 years in Jackie Gleason's personal vault, are now on the air. Long before Ralph became petrified on camera while trying to sell kitchen utensils and playing the ''$99,000 Answer,'' for instance, he had a similar experience pitching Choosy-Chew candy bars. Trixie and Ed eloped. And while the Kramdens' bedroom must remain forever unseen, viewers have at last established conclusively that it contained a double bed. When the 67 ''new'' old ''Honeymooners'' episodes were unearthed earlier this year, the event was compared by aficionados to the discovery of a new Mozart symphony -or a trunkful of them. After all, only 39 episodes of ''The Honeymooners,'' all filmed during the 1955-56 season, were ever pre-pared specifically for syndication, and those are the ones that have been broadcast, again and again and again, ever since.

ST. LOUIS, Oct. 12 - Back home on their slick green carpet after two straight losses, back home in the fast lane, the St. Louis Cardinals finally flashed their speed today and defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-2, for their first victory in the playoff for the National League pennant. It was a game dominated by the Cardinals' speed and marked by the Dodgers' obsession with the Cardinals' speed. It was spiced by pickoff throws and pitchouts and two pickoff throwing errors, and a record total of 13 bases on balls. And it was decided in the first two innings when the renowned ''rabbits'' of St. Louis bedeviled Bob Welch and raced into a 4-0 lead. After that, Danny Cox pitched four-hit ball into the seventh inning to protect the lead, and then turned it over to three members of the Cardinals' bullpen ''committee.'' And, with the help of a pair of dazzling plays at third base by Terry Pendleton, they finished what the sprinters had started.

IT is harvest time on Long Island, and for potato farmers, it looks like a dismal year. Potato yields are up, and prices paid to farmers are way down, $1.75 to $2 for 100 pounds. Moreover, prices usually decrease as the harvest progresses. For Long Island potato farmers, bad years are not all that uncommon, and even the worst are not always considered to be catastrophic. ''This particular year, in and of itself, will not drive us out of business,'' said John White Jr., whose family has been farming the Sagaponack area for 200 years. ''But there's been a cumulative effect. Seven out of the last 10 years, we haven't turned a profit.''

THE Soviet Union, which differs with the United States on the Middle East situation as on most others, gave Washington startling support for its handling of the latest hijacking. Tass, the official press agency, said: ''The Americans' anger at the hijackers' crime aboard a cruise liner is understandable and just.

George Brett, who single-handedly destroyed the Toronto Blue Jays with his bat 24 hours earlier, nearly beat them by merely standing in the batter's box tonight. However, the Blue Jays overcame a losing gamble by their manager, Bobby Cox, and moved one victory away from bringing Canada its first major league pennant. The Blue Jays took a three games to one lead in the four-of-seven American League pennant playoff by rallying for three runs in the ninth inning and defeating the Kansas City Royals, 3-1. A rare walk to Damaso Garcia began the belated, decisive flurry, and Al Oliver climaxed it with a two-run double against Dan Quisenberry, marking the second time in three games that he had driven in the winning run against the league's premier relief pitcher.

''IT'S morning again in America,'' President Reagan told the nation and the world a year ago, but the terrorists in the Middle East paid no attention. They kidnapped American citizens, hijacked them, terrorized and even murdered them with apparent impunity. Mr. Reagan fulminated against their activities, threatened retaliation, ordered his Administration to prepare counter-measures - and found himself unable to take any action that would not risk innocent lives or violate the very norms of civilized international behavior that the terrorists were flaunting. Then on Thursday night, American warplanes forced to earth an Egyptian Boeing 737 jetliner carrying four Palestinians who had commandeered the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and, according to United States officials, killed a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old passenger from New York, Leon Klinghoffer. Rather than fading into the nearest souk, the culprits were thrust, almost miraculously, into the hands of Italian and American troops at a base in Sicily.

IT would be fitting if remembrances of Bo Schembechler's coaching career were eventually put on display at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, instead of in the athletic complex trophy case. Perhaps a discarded game plan - circa 1971 - would be among the museum's artifacts, evidence of what will be remembered as the Stone Age in Big Ten football, beginning in the late 1960's and lasting 13 years. Those were the seasons that conjured images of Schembechler and Woody Hayes -his counterpart at Ohio State - dressed in loincloths and armed with clubs, vying for league supremacy while the other eight teams watched passively. From 1968 through 1980, either Michigan or Ohio State won the Big Ten championship. Six times they tied for the conference title. And that meant every year during that period either the Wolverines or the Buckeyes went to the Rose Bowl. It became known as the Big Two and Little Eight, and the only game that mattered was when the Big Two played in late November.

Much to the disappointment of those who had been patrons throughout the 50-year history of the Little Carnegie Theater, its operators abruptly closed it down after the last screening on April 4, 1982. The building at 144 West 57th Street that housed it was among a cluster of four- and five-story midblock structures that were demolished to make way for Metropolitan Tower, the 78-story mixed-use development project now rising near Seventh Avenue.

The commercial expansion in western Suffkolk County in the late 1970's and early 1980's not only added about 12 million square feet of high-technology research and development space but also created a demand for housing in that part of Long Island. Among the developers now building in the Hauppauge area to meet that demand is the Johansen Organization of Hempstead, which is putting up an 88-unit condominium community on Old Willets Path off Veterans Highway.

The city's Oriental rug dealers, who for decades were congregated in the Midtown area between 28th and 34th Streets from Lexington to Fifth Avenues, are among the most recent Manhattan-based merchants to be driven from their traditional neighborhoods by rising rents and the demand for office and residential space. In the last few months, nearly half of the industry has moved to the 157,000-square-foot merchandizing and showroom facility built for the trade in Harmon Meadow, a mixed-use commercial complex in Secaucus, N.J. Now a similar facility, to be known as the New York Oriental Rug Trade Center, has been developed in Manhattan.

WHEN the University of Hartford pep band strikes up the school's fight song, ''Hartford On to Victory,'' Friday night at the Hartford Civic Center, it will be more appropriate than ever, since it will be played at an actual fight. And when the university's cheerleaders go into action, it will not be on behalf of one of the school teams, but for one student, Troy Wortham, who also happens to be a professional fighter. As Mr. Wortham, a welterweight, seeks his 25th consecutive pro victory, the atmosphere most likely will be more akin to that of a college football or basketball game than a professional boxing card. As fight crowds go, the one on Friday will hardly be typical. Among those in attendance will be Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the university's president; Robert A. Chernak, the vice president; Gordon McCullough, the athletic director, plus a large number of faculty members and hundreds of alumni and students.