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BILLS WOULD LIMIT RECORDED TELEMARKETING

Days after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a man whose house had been leveled was surprised to hear his phone ringing from under a pile of debris. He searched through the rubble and lifted the receiver to this ear, only to hear a recorded message trying to make a sale.

A Michigan family was unable to call an ambulance when their father was injured because an automatic dialing machine had called their house and would not hang up.

And at a college in Pennsylvania, a blind switchboard operator was besieged by an authomatic dialing machine that called her switchboard five times a minute for several days.

These are a few of the many stories told at a recent Senate hearing looking into the "automatic dialing-recorded message playing" machines that are under attack by consumer groups as public annoyances and occasional safety hazards. The machines, which can make their tape-recorded pitch to as many as 1,000 homes a day, have become the primary target of a flurry of pending legislation aimed at regulating the telemarketing industry.

Representative Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., who is sponsoring one of the bills, said the machines are turning home telephones into "receptacles of 'junk calls' in the same way that junk mail often inundates our mailboxes."

Even the Direct Marketing Association, which represents the telemarketers, concedes the need for regulation. Dick Barton, the group's vice president for government affairs, said the organization was ready to support many of the restrictions that would be imposed by bills sponsored by Markey and Senators Larry Pressler, R-S.D. and Ernest Hollings, D-S.C.

Markey's bill would ban any automated calls to public safety numbers, paging services or cellular phones. Pressler would ban those calls as well as any unsolicited advertising sent by fax machine.

Hollings goes furthest of all, outlawing any unwanted automatic calls to homes and requiring autodialers to hang up within five seconds after the call's receiver hangs up.

The bills all passed through committee with strong support, and its seems certain that some version will be passed by both houses of Congress.

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