What was going on when I was born?

President Reagan said today that the Administration viewed a United States space shield against nuclear weapons as a ''moral'' obligation that would improve the prospects for an arms agreement with the Soviet Union. ''This program is an historic turning point,'' Mr. Reagan told an enthusiastic Republican audience in Boise, Idaho, today, referring to his space-based defense program. ''We will not bargain this research and testing program away.'' He added: ''For the first time, energy and resources are being put to use in an attempt to find new technology that is aimed at saving lives. If we are successful, it will improve the opportunity for arms reduction because missiles, no longer the ultimate weapon they are today, will be more negotiable.''

UP in the Catskills on Lookout Farm in Napanoch, N.Y., a deer nibbles on fallen apples. A wild turkey disappears into the bush. Roses, first cultivated in 17th-century France, bloom in unlikely shades of lilac, peach and blood red. The scene is bucolic but hardly a still life - for here, Eugene and Beverly Gregan transform everything that grows into a feast for the senses. In November, a friend who hunts brings deer, which may be cut into sashimi, paper-thin slices of raw venison arranged as petals around a mound of wasabi, Japanese horseradish. Wild duck, quail and other game birds will be cooked and served with herbed sauces. Roses will be picked and arranged as subjects for a painting by Mr. Gregan, then dried as potpourri. Fruits will be dried and their skins made into decorated containers. For Thanksgiving, wild turkey will be stuffed with Canadian wild rice and chestnuts. After the feast, a thigh bone from the bird will be carved into a knife handle. The Gregans, it seems, have refined the 1960's cliche of living off the land into a remarkably sensuous life.

Ore carriers, grain carriers, oil tankers and other ships bearing hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo backed up at the ends of the Welland Canal today after the St. Lawrence Seaway was closed Monday by the collapse of a lock's concrete wall. Seaway officials believe they can complete temporary repairs before the shipping season ends, about two months from now. So far, however, they have not been able to stabilize the damaged wall of the canal enough to drain the water from the lock and survey the damage. ''We're talking about weeks, not days,'' said Kenneth E. Ludwig, the director of operations for the Seaway Authority.

A front-page picture caption in some editions on Sunday, about the Achille Lauro hijacking, misidentified a man shown with Marilyn Klinghoffer, and a correction in this space on Monday specified the error incompletely. In early editions, which pictured Mrs. Klinghoffer at the bottom of the page, an unidentified man stood beside her. In late editions, showing her at the top of the page, the man alongside her was correctly identified as Jay Fischer, a lawyer and family friend.

A dispatch from Tokyo yesterday on Japanese economic changes misstated the time it would take for the changes to produce extra growth in Japan's gross national product. According to Japanese economic officials, they should generate extra growth by October 1986.

''I'm here; I'm staying; nothing is forever, but that's where things stand at the moment.'' - Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.[D1:1.]

Mayor W. Wilson Goode said today for the first time that his subordinates had misled, misinformed and disobeyed him in the city's confrontation with the radical group Move. Testifying for the second day before a panel he appointed to investigate the confrontation, Mr. Goode said he was mistaken to rely on subordinates in the crisis, which ended with the destruction of a neighborhood May 13. ''Knowing what I know now, I certainly would be more of a hands-on kind of person,'' said Mr. Goode, who campaigned on his experience as a problem-solver and as an efficient manager. ''I certainly would pose more specific type of questions.''

''But how could Willy Loman be the family's leader, if he was the sick one?'' asked Dr. Abraham Zaleznik, a Harvard Business School professor whose class had just studied Arthur Miller's ''Death of a Salesman'' as a homework assignment. A hand shot up from a second-year student in the fourth row. ''He may not have been a particularly effective leader, but he certainly was a leader,'' she said. ''Well,'' Professor Zaleznik said, ''sometimes the individual who is the sickest can exert the greatest influence in the family.'' The subject of the family had come to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in ''The Social Psychology of Management,'' the fall-semester elective course taught by Professor Zaleznik. The focus of the school's renowned case-analysis teaching method on a recent morning was neither a takeover bid nor a leveraged buyout, but rather the tragic family dynamics of the Lomans. In the previous session, the 103 students in the class had dissected the relationships in ''Interiors,'' the Woody Allen film.

The choice of Franco Modigliani as winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science is a popular one among economists, a tribe often given to highly refined and sometimes vocal dispute. Yesterday congratulatory telephone calls and laudatory telegrams poured in to his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ''Economists all over the world are students, admirers and friends of Franco Modigliani,'' said Paul A. Samuelson of M.I.T., himself a Nobel laureate, Like previous winners of the award, Professor Modigliani (pronounced ''mo-deel-YAH-nee'') is considered a consummate academic and an intellectual pathfinder. But unlike some others, whose work was either obscure or accessible only to specialists, his ideas have shaped generations of students. ''If you took finance at business school, if you studied economics, or if you studied corporations in law school, chances are you will have heard of Franco's propositions,'' said Eugene Flood, professor of finance at the Stanford Business School. He studied in graduate school under Professor Modigliani.

Yasir Arafat's international standing has been greatly damaged by the Achille Lauro affair, according to both Arab and Israeli Middle East political analysts. These analysts say the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, combined with the British Government's refusal Monday to meet with two Palestine Liberation Organization representatives, not only has damaged Mr. Arafat's stature in the West but also has complicated his relations with key Arab governments. In the last two days, both Syria and Jordan have taken their own quiet revenge on Mr. Arafat. The net result is that the Jordanian-Palestinian peace initiative of last Feb. 11 appears to be in jeopardy, along with whatever else remains of the current Middle East peace process. The Syrian and Jordanian blows against Mr. Arafat came in the form of seemingly innocuous communiques issued in Damascus and Amman. But each spoke volumes about the state of Syrian and Jordanian relations with the P.L.O. chairman in the aftermath of the Achille Lauro episode.

A picture caption in Metropolitan Report on Friday about the surrender of the jeweler Nicola Bulgari in a tax case included an incorrect description, from the office of Attorney General Robert Abrams, on the sequence of events surrounding the indictment. Mr. Bulgari was already out of the country on Aug. 7 when the indictment was unsealed. He was considered a fugitive by the Attorney General's office until his surrender last week.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev presented drafts of new political and economic programs today that he said were free of the ''groundless fantasies'' of past blueprints yet would almost double national income within 15 years. The long-awaited documents were not immediately published, but the Soviet leader described the main goals in a speech to a meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee, at which the drafts were introduced. He called for widespread discussion of the drafts in the months leading up to the full-dress party congress scheduled for next February. The drafts essentially amounted to blueprints for the new administration begun last March by Mr. Gorbachev and offered few surprises.