October 21, 1986

Elderly residents of the New York suburbs, caught in a simmering dispute between the generations, are being forced by the thousands into substandard housing, homelessness and despair. Municipal officials say the elderly - those who founded many of the suburbs after World War II - are now being victimized by the soaring cost of suburban life. Faced with lofty property taxes, rising utility bills and surging rental rates, many of those over 65 years old, living on fixed incomes, are being displaced from their homes at a time of frenetic economic growth. ''The term 'homeless' used to connote a type of desperate poverty that we didn't see much of here,'' said Larry Dwyer, the Town Supervisor of Bedford, in Westchester County. ''Now it applies to our parents. It applies to the people who have anchored the community for decades.''

The whole idea was to make a better bag. The Dow Chemical Company's Ziploc bag commanded more than half of the market for ''reclosable plastic food storage bags'' - the kind with two narrow tracks at the top that pinch shut. And Glad Products was struggling to cut into that lead. For a year, a team of 20 scientists and engineers working for Glad in Chicago experimented with dozens of colors to put on the tracks of its bags, so that when the tracks were squeezed together, the seal would turn a different color. They finally settled on a combination known to every kindergartner: yellow and blue, which would turn to green. The closure on Ziploc and other brands is clear.

Not long ago one of the last frontiers of banking opportunity was the vast realm of medium-sized corporations that kept so many local bankers in clover. Over recent years, just about every type of bank imaginable - from large regional banks to money-center institutions to the great lenders of Europe and Asia - has pursued the field with abandon. So much so that now it has reached a point where the so-called middle market has become a glutted, bare-knuckle business where profits on loans have tumbled and loan quality is deteriorating. ''There are too many banks chasing the deals, and some of the newcomers are probably making questionable credits,'' said Carol J. Parry, a senior vice president at the Chemical Bank. 'It's More Crowded' ''It's definitely getting tougher to make money in the middle market,'' said William Knowles, the chief executive of National Westminster Bank U.S.A., another big middle-market lender. ''It's more crowded, and pricing is thus becoming far more competitive.''

The Enron Corporation yesterday ended a double threat to its independence by repurchasing stock held by both Irwin L. Jacobs, the Minneapolis investor, and the Leucadia National Corporation at a price well above the going rate. Enron said the transaction, which was approved by its board of directors, would cost it $15 million to $20 million. In an action that surprised Wall Street, the Houston-based natural gas pipeline company said that Mr. Jacobs's 5.1 million Enron shares and Leucadia's 2.3 million shares would eventually be purchased from Enron by a new employee stock ownership plan. Together, the two owned 16.4 percent of Enron's stock, with Mr. Jacobs the larger shareholder at 11.4 percent.

Now their backs were literally to The Wall. And there, in the shadow of Fenway Park's left-field wall, the most inviting and most dangerous home run target in baseball, the Mets will resume the World Series on Tuesday night, two games down to the Boston Red Sox and thinking about the unthinkable. They were solemn, maybe subdued, as they gathered at Shea Stadium this morning, not many hours after losing the second game of the Series, 9-3. And that was 24 hours after losing the first game, 1-0. And that was three days after they had soared to dramatic highs by winning the National League pennant in a 16-inning, four-and-a-half-hour performance that spiced a season of 108 victories.