May 14, 1982

The Big Three auto manufacturers reported today that sale rose a substantial 20.6 percent in early May, renewing hopes for a successful spring selling season. The General Motors Corporation reported sales were up 30.6 percent, the sharpest increase of the five major domestic manufacturers, while the Ford Motor Company's sales increased 5.1 percent from the comparable 1981 period. Sales by the Chrysler Corporation were up 2.5 percent. There were eight selling days in the period both this year and last.

Inside turn-of-the-century buildings that once produced mattresses and bicycles, the American Motors Corporation is preparing for what is probably its last effort to remain a volume manufacturer of passenger cars. A.M.C. is set to begin production of the Alliance, a front-wheeldrive subcompact model, next month, with public introduction scheduled for early in September. The company said it hopes to sell 100,000 Alliances in 1983. The badges on the backs of some pilot production cars tell of their ancestry. On the right is the familiar A.M.C. logo; on the left is the Renault emblem. The Alliance, in fact, is an Americanized version of the French company's R-9 model, which was introduced in Europe last year. It is about the size of a Ford Escort, but is classified as a five-passenger, rather than a four-passenger, car.

The Port Authority, in the first step of what is expected to be a 15-year, $600 million improvement program for the New York area's major airports, yesterday approved the construction of new cargo buildings at Kennedy and Newark International Airports. The agency also authorized $200 million for commuter buses for New York and New Jersey. The plan for Kennedy Airport comes after an agreement between the Koch administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in which the city accepted lower rent for the airports in return for the 15-year development program. The Port Authority plan will eventually include expanded roads, runways and passenger terminals.

It has been dry on the high plains of eastern Colorado this spring, as dry as it has been in years. And when the winds come, turning the sky dark with dust and burying fence rows under shifting dunes of soil and thistle, those who are old enough remember the bleak days of the Dust Bowl, nearly 50 years ago. ''Rain would help, that's for sure,'' said Donald Moss, who works with the United States Soil Conservation Service district office in Denver. ''But that's only part of it. The real problem is that a lot of people have taken to plowing up land that should never have been plowed up in the first place. And if we don't stop it, it could all blow away, just like it did during the Dust Bowl years.'' All across the Western high plains, from Montana to Texas, plows have torn out the dense, soil-retaining roots of more than a million acres of grassland and prairie, much of it over the last three years, and state and local officials are growing more and more alarmed about erosion.

The disclosure that Attorney General William French Smith personally invested in an oil and gas partnership that would give him $4 of tax write-offs for every dollar he put in last year seems likely to rekindle the longstanding debate over the use of tax shelters by high-income taxpayers. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Roscoe L. Egger Jr., has estimated that questionable tax shelters cost the Government $3.6 billion a year, and the I.R.S. has for several years been making special efforts to wipe them out. Ironically, the public uproar over tax shelters seems due in part to the increased publicity generated by the crackdown. ''Up until five years ago, the I.R.S. was almost derelict in its duty,'' said Lee Seidler of Bear, Stearns & Company. ''People were getting away with murder. Since then, the laws have changed drastically. Whatever the public perception, the fact is that the most abusive tax shelters, the exotic ones involving Bibles and cattle, have been largely wiped out.''