What was going on when I was born?

President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines has rejected a plea by the Reagan Administration for major political, economic and military changes to avert further turmoil there, Administration officials said today. President Reagan's personal envoy, Senator Paul Laxalt, Republican of Nevada, returned late Thursday night from Manila aboard a United States military plane after a series of meetings with Mr. Marcos. Mr. Laxalt requested a White House meeting with Mr. Reagan ''as soon as possible,'' an aide to the Senator said. A White House official said President Reagan would probably meet Mr. Laxalt on Monday or Tuesday.

Sitting on the dais, Eugene Lang, multimillionaire industrialist, suddenly realized the commencement address he was about to deliver was complete balderdash, to put it nicely. He was about to tell 61 sixth-graders in a warm Harlem auditorium that he had also attended P.S. 121, a half-century ago, that he had worked hard and made a lot of money, and that - quick, the No-Doz! - if they worked hard maybe they could be successful too. Instead, Mr. Lang, a magnate with a no-nonsense style, stepped to the podium and told the graduates that if they stayed in school he would pay the college tuitions for each and every one of them: college educations on the house! There was stunned silence, peppered with a few audible gasps. Then students, parents and teachers cheered and mobbed him. ''I have never kissed so many strangers,'' Mr. Lang recalled. He told them that he was thereby earmarking $2,000 for each of them toward college tuitions, that he would add more money each year that they stayed in school and that their college tuition was assured.

Despite international appeals for clemency, a black supporter of the outlawed African National Congress was hanged today in Pretoria for his role in the 1982 murder of a security policeman. The execution of the black activist, Benjamin Moloise, 30 years old, set off rioting by hundreds of blacks in downtown Johannesburg. Two white policemen were stabbed, a black man was shot by security forces and at least eight white pedestrians were beaten on the city streets. President P. W. Botha had received appeals from around the world to commute the execution, including appeals from the United States, the Commonwealth, the European Economic Community and the United Nations. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution last year calling on the South African authorities not to execute Mr. Moloise. [In Washington, a State Department spokesman said, ''We have made plain our opinion that clemency in this case was justified.'' At the United Nations, Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar deplored the hanging, and the Organization of African Unity denounced what it called the South African Government's ''act of barbarism.''] Mr. Moloise's lawyers had asked that the case be reopened because of new evidence that they said would have led to commutation of the sentence. Mr. Moloise was sentenced to death in September 1983 for the murder of the security policeman 10 months earlier.

The first evidence that an Air-India jumbo jet may have been destroyed by a bomb has been detected on a fragment of the fuselage brought up by a salvage ship, an American official said yesterday. The Boeing 747 crashed into the sea off Ireland last June 23, killing all 329 people aboard. Holes apparently caused by objects that pierced the skin of the plane from the inside have been found in a piece of belly skin from the forward cargo area, according to an official from the National Transportation Safety Board. Asked if this was proof that the plane had been blown up, the safety board official said the evidence was preliminary, but acknowledged that it pointed in the direction of a bomb.

President Reagan tonight sent a special representative to Italy, Tunisia and Egypt in an effort to ease tensions with those countries, Administration officials said. The envoy, John C. Whitehead, Deputy Secretary of State, was carrying messages from Mr. Reagan to the leaders of each country in an effort to rebuild confidence, the officials said. The disputes with Egypt and Italy arose after the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a 69-year-old passenger, Leon Klinghoffer of New York, was slain. #2 Destinations Confirmed The State Department tonight confirmed Mr. Whitehead's visit to Italy and Egypt. Because of the sensitive nature of relations with Tunisia, there was no announcement of the stop in Tunis.

The Defense Department has decided to screen all 2.1 million military personnel for infection by the virus that can cause acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, a Pentagon official said today. Those who are found to have the AIDS disease itself will be treated and counseled and will receive medical discharges under honorable conditions, the official said. Any men or women who have been infected with the virus but do not show signs of disease will be retained in the armed forces but will probably have their duties and geographical assignments limited under procedures to be worked out by the Army, Navy and Air Force, the official added. Reasons Given for Steps Pentagon officials cited several reasons for moving faster and further than civilian agencies to detect and restrict infected individuals. They said the Army, in particular, argued that it must be able to deploy personnel anywhere in the world on short notice, without worrying about soldiers being weakened by the AIDS virus.

Grossinger's, the sprawling Catskills resort that became emblematic of the borscht-belt brand of humor and, especially at mealtimes, of Oscar Wilde's credo that nothing succeeds like excess, is being sold by the family that founded it in a seven-room farmhouse 71 years ago. A group of New York investors said yesterday that after purchasing the 812-acre site in Sullivan County for about $9 million, it would spend more than $4 million to renovate the 585-room, Tudor-style hotel. The investors also said they would break ground next spring for the first 250 of as many as 2,000 town house condominiums to be built along the 25-acre lake and 27-hole golf course. ''We're going to be creating a spa-type resort, more of a yuppie-type of facility, while keeping the grace and charm of the old Grossinger's,'' Glenn Chwatt, one of the investors, said yesterday. ''We'll have a gourmet dining room for weight-watchers with a separate kitchen, so that if you walk to the left you're sure to lose 10 pounds and if you turn to the right you're sure to gain 10.''

At least 10 men died in an explosion Thursday on a barge that had been preparing to repair a broken oil main on the seabed in the Gulf of Paria, near the oil terminal at Pointe-a-Pierre, officials said today. Ten bodies were found within minutes of the explosion, and four other men were feared drowned. A spokesman for the Trinidad and Tobago Oil Company said escaping fumes ignited and caused the blast.

With Britain and most of the other members of the Commonwealth still at odds over the issue of sanctions against South Africa, Canada and Australia appeared today to be emerging as brokers for a compromise. The Prime Ministers of the two countries and their staffs have been meeting late into the night here with colleagues from Britain, which opposes sanctions, and from most of the other Commonwealth countries, which favor sanctions, in search of some middle ground.

Pope John Paul II today described the global debt crisis as an ''ethical and humanitarian'' issue and called on the United Nations to play a ''front line'' role in the effort to find solutions. In a strongly worded message read to the General Assembly by the Vatican Secretary of State, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the Pope singled out the indebtedness problem for attention. The problem, he said, has brought ''whole countries to the brink of breakdown.'' Neither debtor nor creditor nations ''have anything to gain from the development of situations of despair that would be uncontrollable'' because of the debt, he added.

The Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, in an article to be published Saturday in Pravda, calls recent Reagan Administration interpretations of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty a ''deliberate deceit.'' In the Soviet Union's first high-level response to recent White House assertions that the treaty does not prohibit the development of defensive weapons in space, Marshal Akhromeyev said the United States was ''distorting the essence'' of the agreement. Tass, the official Soviet press agency, published an advance text of Marshal Akhromeyev's article tonight.

A clandestine Solidarity leader has challenged Government voting figures on parliamentary elections, saying that 40 percent of the electorate heeded the underground's call for a boycott. The man, Zbigniew Bujak, fugitive leader of the clandestine wing of the outlawed trade union movement, made the assertion to a group of Western correspondents on Thursday night. He said the results of the elections last Sunday, as reported and tabulated by 6,000 underground activists, represented ''a moderate victory for Solidarity.'' Mr. Bujak, a 31-year-old former chemical plant worker, has eluded the police since martial law was declared almost four years ago. Martial law was officially ended in July 1983.