Nephew Staunches Flood of Direct Mail

As near as Dave Hale can figure, it started with an environmental group.

His aunt, Jean Ireland, was 84 when she first began sending bits of her Social Security money to the Sierra Club and the Jepson Herbarium, a center devoted to protecting native California plants.

Then one of the groups rented its donor list to another public interest group. When those appeals arrived, Ireland would scrape up $5 or $10 for them too, Hale said.

By 1994, the year Ireland turned 100, a heaping bushel of heart-rending solicitations would land at her Sebastopol apple farm each month.

From Republicans and Democrats. From Pat Boone and the Feminist Majority. From half a dozen Indian groups, the Olympic Committee and folks battling blindness, cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.

“She’d reached the age where she didn’t know what was going on,” said Hale, who moved in with his aunt last year. “She was living on Social Security, and whatever she had left at the end of the month, she would donate. . . . I’m sure a lot of elderly people get bilked.”

Hale, 39, went on a mission to stop the deluge. One year, hundreds of dollars, and scores of letters and phone calls later, Hale is a weary David who has just about licked the direct-mail Goliath.

His war began in January 1995, when he started keeping a log of his aunt’s mail. At first, he sent the solicitations back with notes attached asking that Ireland be removed from the mailing list “promptly.” The second time around the note was more firm: “2nd NOTICE!!! REMOVE OUR NAME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST.”

When that didn’t work, Hale began calling repeat “perpetrators” across the nation, running up a $400 phone bill in three months. Some groups had no listed number. He called Citizens United, a Virginia-based group, a dozen times. His mail log grew to 13 pages, single spaced.

Most groups told him that it would take one to five months to be “removed from the system.” Even then, they added, his aunt’s name probably already had been rented to someone else.

Some groups, such as the Republican Senate Majority, continued to send mail to the lifelong Democrat, despite telling Hale that his aunt’s name had been purged from its list months earlier. Hale’s voice became so recognizable to certain groups that they would “hang up the phone when I called.”

Three months after his quest began, Hale began shredding the solicitations and returning them in the enclosed envelopes.

It didn’t seem to matter that his aunt was no longer donating, Hale said.

“She gave the National Organization for Women $5 three years ago--I had them research it--and they’re still sending her stuff every three weeks to a month,” Hale said.

The Escondido-based US Justice Foundation, which Hale said was sending up to three letters a week, assured him that the barrage of mail would cease. Five months later, Hale said, the mail was still coming.

Gary Kreep, executive director of US Justice, apologized, saying Hale’s aunt’s name was probably on dozens of lists his group rents. Even if he took her off their list, Kreep said, her name would pop up on another. “Unfortunately, we’re kind of locked into a system,” he said.

On the advice of authorities, Hale sent a form from the post office to the Direct Marketing Assn. requesting that the mail be stopped. He sent one in March, April, May, June and July. The mail slowed a bit but kept coming.

One fund-raiser he recently called told Hale what he did when he wanted the mail to stop.

“He said to put a phone book in an envelope and attach the group’s business reply envelope to it and send it back,” said Hale, who was checking to see if this is legal. By February 1996, more than a year after he began, Hale is down to two pieces of mail a day. He doesn’t know if he would do it again. He doesn’t think most people would.

But, he said, “I think we’ve been relatively successful.”