August 27, 1984

''As a person and a writer, I seem to have had little effect on improving the world I came into.

When Jim Cashman, Joe Gabriele and Steve Hueglin decided to start their own firm in the Death Valley that was the municipal bond market in September 1979, many friends and colleagues on Wall Street raised their eyebrows. Inflation and rising interest rates were eroding the market value of municipal bonds: By the end of 1981, some had lost 50 percent of their value. The then-recent fiscal troubles of New York and other cities had also attached a bad odor to the market. Investors were wary. It seemed an unlikely juncture to leave steady jobs and pool $350,000, much of it borrowed from family, friends and banks, to plant it in a new municipal bond firm. ''It wasn't the best of times to take a chance; it was a gamble,'' said James R. Engels, a Government bond broker with the Cantor, Fitzgerald Securities Corporation. But Mr. Engels, who knew the three men well - and their contacts - was less skeptical than some. ''I thought it was a good shot,'' he added.

When employees of the Victor Company of Japan make valuable suggestions, they are often rewarded with little statues of a dog, the company mascot. It is the same dog that once listened to his master's voice in advertisements for Victrolas. But JVC, as the company is known, has remained true to its mascot, while the RCA Corporation, the American descendant of the Victor Talking Machine Company, discarded it for a time as the company moved into high technology. Such devotion to its consumer electronics roots runs deep at the company that made Japan's first television set in 1939 and which, in 1976, developed the VHS format video cassette recorder that surpassed Sony's Betamax for the dominant share in the world market. But now JVC faces a challenge. Can it develop a product as successful as its television and video cassette recorder?

A critical shortage of semiconductors appears to be easing, after a year of scarcity that forced many makers of computers, video cassette recorders and other electronic products to reduce their production. Both manufacturers and industry experts say that some parts, especially a new generation of more powerful microprocessors, are still in extremely short supply. But backlogs for older products, especially 64K memory chips and Erasable-Programmable Read Only Memories, known as EPROMs, have declined sharply. In part, the greater availability of semiconductors seems attributable to an expected seasonal slowdown in orders. But also, several crash programs, involving seven-day-a-week operation of silicon-wafer fabrication plants and the building of new production lines, have increased the industry's capacity.

The Mets received two big surprises yesterday, one from the Giants and the other from one of their own, and both were instrumental in thwarting San Francisco's thoughts of shattering the Mets with a sweep of their four-game series. After falling into a depressed state over three consecutive one-run losses to the Giants, the Mets revived their spirits with an 11-6 victory built on home runs by Keith Hernandez and Kelvin Chapman. Therein lay the surprises. Hernandez hit a three-run homer in the fourth inning in a situation in which the Mets never expected him to get a pitch to hit anywhere, let alone over the fence. No one was on first base and a struggling Darryl Strawberry was the next batter, yet the Giants surprised the Mets by letting Hernandez hit. The homer, against Mike Krukow, catapulted the Mets into a 6-5 lead.