Love lasts forever, but occasionally it retires.
Betty Love spent decades presiding over intimate wedding ceremonies at Love’s Wedding Chapel, near the corner of Wrightsboro Road and Monte Sano Avenue.
Now, after more than 20 years of sharing the love with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of couples, she decided several months ago to take down her shingle. This Valentine’s Day will be the first one in years without Love’s Wedding Chapel.
“It’s been good to me, the business,” she told The Augusta Chronicle. “But I’m old now. I don’t drive anymore so it’s hard for me to get to the office now. And I don’t have the strength to do it anymore because even though it isn’t a hard thing, it takes energy to perform a ceremony.”
Love opened her chapel with a backyard gazebo in 2001 at 2477 Wrightsboro Rd., where she conducted a previous hypnotherapy business. By then, among other jobs, she also had worked as a real estate agent and a Welcome Wagon representative, managed a dress shop and helped manage a Krystal restaurant.
Love’s first paying job was after school in 1957 at the former Georgia Railroad Bank, where in the days before widespread computer use the 16-year-old would alphabetize and collate checks and forms for bookkeepers to use the next day.
Her father wasn’t crazy about her job. At the time he was the bank’s comptroller and vice president.
"He didn’t like it, but I wanted to work so bad he finally relented and let me go to work,” Love recalled. “But it was kind of embarrassing for him, seeing his daughter work at the bank.”
In 1989 she opened the Love Skin and Nail Care beauty salon at the Bon Air Hotel, and by 1991 hit upon the idea of operating a mobile salon to bring hair care and personal comfort to homebound seniors.
Becoming an ordained minister in 1999, Love – who's said that she got her surname from both “her earthly father and her heavenly Father” – started her wedding chapel soon after.
Even Love has found love herself through the years, but she won’t always tell you how many times, beyond referring with a laugh to “multiple marriages.” Now 82, she still owns her chapel but sees further use for it as rentable space.
"I was there a long time,” she said. “I certainly enjoyed it.”
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Love's Wedding Chapel in Augusta bows out of the romance business