February 25, 1981

President Reagan's abolition of controls on gasoline is likely to change the way it is sold in the United States, oil industry officials predict. They say the end of price and allocation controls could drive thousands of wholesalers and retailers out of business by making it easier for the more efficient big operators to devour small competitors. In addition, they see some major brands moving out of areas where they were previously common and an accelerating trend toward bigger, less personalized service stations. ''Decontrol has thrown chaos into the situation, and thrown the big oil companies into the driver's seat,'' declared Representative Berkley Bedell, Democrat of Iowa, who has introduced legislation to protect smaller dealers.

President Reagan said today that he had ''no intention'' of involving the United States inextricably in the fighting in El Salvador, but he declared that his Administration would continue to support the Government there against those committed to its ''violent overthrow.'' The President's comments at a brief news conference this morning came as he scheduled a meeting of his top national security advisers tomorrow to discuss ways to bolster El Salvador's Government. El Salvador's military leaders say they can defeat the guerrillas despite a Pentagon report to the contrary, and in interviews in San Salvador they gave a less drastic view of the military threat to the country than the one presented in Washington. (Page A4.)

Underscoring near-record yields prevailing in the fixed-income market, underwriters sold a triple-A debenture issue of the Bell System yesterday at a record return of 14.80 percent. Bear, Stearns & Company, the winner in competitive bidding against two other syndicates, led the group offering a $275 million issue of 40-year debentures for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. The successful bid was 98.229 for 14 5/8 percent interest coupons.

A divorced parent's ability to live where he or she chooses may be limited by the right of a child and the other parent to see each other conveniently, the New York State Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled today. In a unanimous decision, the court held that a woman could not move from Westchester County to Las Vegas, Nev., simply to try to make ''a new life'' for herself, because doing so would end the father's ''meaningful access to his son.'' The case involved George David Weiss, a Broadway and movie songwriter, and his former wife, Rosalyn, who said she wanted to move to Las Vegas in the hope of resuming her former career as a singer. The opinion was one of several rulings on family life handed down by the Court of Appeals today. In another, the court gave a narrow interpretation to the circumstances that would justify a court's unsealing the records of an adopted child to disclose the identities of the natural parents.

''THE essential concept to be grasped is the very eminence of chocolate,'' said Milton Zelman, with a far-off look in his eyes. ''It speaks to those who love it. There is something profound about it - but the tragedy is that not enough attention is paid to chocolate.'' Mr. Zelman has been doing his best to remedy that condition, being the proprietor of Chocolate News, a newsletter that, he asserts modestly, ''is chocolate central in the chocolate universe - the clearing house for chocolate information.''