What was going on when I was born?

New Year's Eve began at Kinnick Stadium when the clock ticked under one minute. When the clock reached zero, and the Hawkeyes were alone atop the Big Ten for the first time in 27 years, the band played - what else? - ''California, Here We Come.'' The plans for the Harmon family reunion, however, had already been made. The Hawkeyes defeated Minnesota, 31-9, for Iowa's fourth trip to the Rose Bowl and its first outright conference championship since 1958. The Gophers (6-5) will play in the Independence Bowl against Clemson. For the Hawkeyes, ranked as high as third in the latest polls, the victory was the 10th in 11 games, the first 10-victory season in Iowa history.

SPROUTING like high-tech mushrooms on the lawns and roofs of suburban homes, satellite-dish television antennas are beginning to raise some serious issues for homeowners, their neighbors and those who regulate the environment. The dish antennas are most often installed in outlying regions of the metropolitan area, such as northern Westchester or rural Connecticut, where homes are spread so widely that it does not pay cable companies to set up service. They are proliferating because the price has dropped sufficiently in the last year or so to make them relatively affordable; they now average around $3,000. At issue among residents of many of these areas is the best way to regulate the placement of the dishes to minimize their impact on the character of the countryside. Also of concern is whether they emit radiation, creating a health danger for the owners' families or their neighbors.

The House Ways and Means Committee early today finished drafting the most sweeping changes in the Federal income tax system approved by a Congressional committee since World War II. The measure differed in a number of ways from President Reagan's tax proposal, but committee members said the Administration supported the committee version. The measure would affect the tax liability of almost every household and corporation in the nation. It would sharply lower tax rates, abolish many tax preferences, apply a stiff minimum tax to wealthy people and profitable companies, remove the poor from the tax rolls altogether and shift part of the tax burden from individuals to corporations. Differences With Reagan Plan The committee's plan would be more favorable to lower- and middle-income taxpayers and less advantageous to the wealthy than the proposals Mr. Reagan sent Congress last May. It would differ from the President's plan in many other important respects, retaining, for instance, deductions for state and local taxes that Mr. Reagan wanted to disallow and setting a top individual tax rate of 38 percent instead of the 35 percent Mr. Reagan sought.

Kevin McHale says the Boston Celtics have been together so long that they take their skills for granted. It took Bill Walton, one of the newest members of the team, to make him understand just how difficult it was to play against the towering Celtic front line. ''He told me that just when you get by one guy, there's another one there to block your shot,'' McHale said. ''And when you think you've got position for a rebound, someone else reaches over you. It's tough. But it takes someone from the outside to come in and tell you before you realize it.''

A retired analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency was charged today with selling American secrets to China for more than 30 years. Federal law-enforcement officials said the analyst, Larry Wu-Tai Chin, worked for the C.I.A. for nearly three decades and continued providing documents to China after his retirement in 1981. In the Korean War, prosecutors said, Mr. Chin supplied the Chinese with information about Chinese prisoners of war held by American forces. Mr. Chin, 63 years old, is one of only a handful of C.I.A. officials ever arrested on espionage charges. He was charged with espionage and conspiracy, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

FEW have accused Mikhail S. Gorbachev of being sentimental or prey to what Leninists call ''subjectivism.'' But for a moment last week one of the world's two most powerful citizens sounded like any ordinary mortal who feels comforted when the Soviet Union and the United States are talking to each other instead of shouting at each other. ''I would...be so bold as to say that the world has become a more secure place,'' declared the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party after two days of intensive discussions with Ronald Reagan, who had once denounced his country as an ''evil empire.'' ''We have taken the first step on the road to understanding, to mutual respect.'' Mr. Reagan echoed some of this satisfaction in his report to Congress. ''I can't claim we had a meeting of the minds on such fundamentals as ideology and national purpose,'' he said, ''but we understand each other better. And that's a key to peace.''

In the predawn hours before President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev left Geneva on Thursday, American officials grew concerned about the outcome of the summit meeting and devised a ''blow-up scenario'' to limit political damage in case the meeting collapsed at the final ceremony. ''We had a nightmare vision with world headlines saying, 'Summit Breaks Up Over 'Star Wars,' '' an American official said. The specter of a collapse - and the resolution of this last-minute hitch with the agreement on a joint statement -were among accounts of the summit meeting pieced together from descriptions provided by officials of the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon who had been close to the negotiating sessions and the leaders' private talks. The President described the private talks to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Robert C. McFarlane, his national security adviser, and Donald T. Regan, his chief of staff. Details were provided to other officials, and their descriptions were used to reconstruct these episodes.

The Yale team that was supposed to be such a a decisive winning one this season emerged in its final game today and upset Harvard, 17-6, before a crowd of 57,647 at the Yale Bowl. The outcome cost the Crimson a share of the Ivy League championship that went to Pennsylvaia and gave Yale its first victory in a month. The Harvard team that played so well in defeating Penn last Saturday concluded its season with a 7-3 record, 5-2 in the league for a second-place tie with Princeton. Yale was 4-4-1, 3-3-1 in Ivy play for fifth after being a preseason favorite.

''The fact that many so-called modern architects still go around practicing a trade as if it were alive can be taken as one of the great curiosities of our age,'' the critic Charles Jencks wrote in 1977, for modern architecture, in his view, had already ''expired finally and completely.'' Mr. Jencks was not alone: numerous critics have spoken over the last decade of modernism's end, its collapse, its upheaval, its death. Whatever the favored metaphor, the message was the same - modern architecture's time is over. In many ways, of course, it is. Modernism in its various forms will never again, at least in our time, hold sway over the creative impulses of the age as it did for the first six decades of this century. But if the last few years have shown us anything, it is that modernism has not so much died as been transformed, and in a different guise continues to occupy a position in contemporary architecture that is not so far from the mainstream. Modernist ideology does not have the meaning it once did, and modern buildings do not take on the same form, but a resurgent modernism appears to be edging back toward the center of the architectural stage.

MIAMI In Florida, where people always talk about the weather, many of them do something about it all year round. They run, ride bicycles, swim, run track, play baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, tennis and soccer. They also like to play football. Oh, do they like to play football. ''When I was 7 years old, I begged my mom to let me play,'' said Melvin Bratton, who is now a 20-year-old sophomore running back at the University of Miami. So what's the big deal? Just this: In most parts of the state, the weather is so conducive to outdoor activity throughout the year, and football is so popular, that some kids can run a flea-flicker before they can spell it. And while many of the more talented youngsters in Florida are running their way into college, an increasing number of them - players like Melvin Bratton - are doing so close to home.

The Flip Side of Flops More than 58,000 businesses will shut down this year, a rise of 6 percent over 1984's failures. But Joseph W. Duncan, an economist at the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, says the increase - the first since 1983 - is not necessarily bad news. New businesses, he says, always represent a hefty chunk of each year's failures, so the rising numbers mean that entrepreneurs feel optimistic enough about the economy to take risks. These days, says Mr. Duncan, many of them are taking an extra risk, by starting businesses that depend on fickle consumers for their fate. ''The high-cost, highly specialized boutique is the mom-and-pop store of the 1980's,'' he said. These businesses have sprung up in response to the specialized - and trendy - demands of two-income families with lots of discretionary spending power, he notes. The trouble is that customers evaporate as soon as a hot trend cools.

For those in the market for existing residential properties, the search is a fairly straightforward process. But where do home buyers who want to start from scratch begin?