Weddings on the Run : Business Is Booming for Mobile Minister’s ‘Confidential’ Nuptials

In a Hyundai as white as a wedding cake, Velma Ruth Austin rides the open road, a repertoire of tear-jerking sermons in her head and a priestly robe in her trunk.

Poised by her cellular phone, she’s ready to marry anybody, anywhere, anytime for 150 bucks. Prisoners and people who get married in El Cajon get a discount.

“I just did seven weddings on Saturday. On the Fourth of July I did eight,” said the 58-year-old El Cajon grandmother, notary and ordained nondenominational minister. “I’ve married people at noon, at 2 a.m., at 4 a.m. I walk into all kinds of strange situations. During the week, it’s usually rather quick--just people wanting to get married in a hurry.”

She chats as she drives the Hyundai, its side inscribed with curly red script reading: “Mobile Marriage, Confidential License, No Blood Test.”

“You know that all of them are not doing the right thing,” she continued in a soft Alabama accent. “But when you’re running a business, sometimes you do things you don’t feel that good about.”

So far, she hasn’t turned anybody down. And business is booming.

She’s married murderers in jail, dying men drawing their last breath, and dangerous gang members. She married a couple from atop a horse at the Lakeside Polo Club, and an 18-year-old groom and a 48-year-old bride in a spur-of-the-moment ceremony in a downtown motel room. Each day holds a weird surprise.

Austin owes her good fortune to a niche in California law that allows for “confidential” marriages. Unlike public marriage licenses, which are issued by counties, confidential licenses require no blood test and no witnesses.

They also are kept in a restricted county file; only the bride and groom can obtain copies. To be eligible for a confidential license, couples have to swear that they are already living together. The assumption is that they don’t need a blood test because they have already been exposed to each others’ diseases.

As a notary, Austin is authorized to issue only confidential marriage licenses.

When she founded “Mobile Marriage” 2 1/2 years ago, Austin had experience in weddings, lots and lots of weddings. She had spent years as night manager of a Riverside wedding chapel. Before that, she was a supervisor in a Corona plumbing supply factory.

Austin attributes her success to her non-judgmental style, her Christian but “not overly religious” manner, and her ad in the Yellow Pages.

That ad, Austin said, has inspired countless free-wheeling, late-night phone calls.

Once, in the wee hours, a Channel 8 reporter saw the ad and called from a bar, wanting to get hitched. NOW.

After some haggling over the price and some brandy-drinking, the reporter ended up getting married at 4 a.m. in the living room of Austin’s double-wide mobile home in El Cajon.

“It was just a crazy evening,” Austin said, declining to identify the couple.

But the unusual seems to be the norm in her business.

Not long ago, Austin hitched a rugby player and his girlfriend in a renegade ceremony in the spectacular, half-built Mormon Temple in La Jolla. The couple, neither of whom were Mormon, wed amid the dust and stray beams.

The Mormons were not amused.

“That is highly unorthodox,” said Floyd Packard, temple president, who found out about the stealth wedding later. “A person who would do that would do a lot of other things too.”

Indeed, there seems to be no end to the things Austin would do.

One night, she crashed the stage at a La Mesa nightclub, and performed a wedding before a surprised audience.

“I jumped on the stage and I kicked off my shoes,” she said. “I just kind of go with the flow.”

One spring night, shimmering in her robe, Austin married a couple in the parking lot of the National City McDonald’s. She set her boom-box on top of a car and the “Wedding March” warbled out, filling the Big Mac-scented air.

The marriage business is a growth industry, and Austin is blown in all directions, like yesterday’s rice on the church steps.

She married more than 50 couples in July, bringing her yearly total to 350. At this rate, she will double her business over last year, when she married just 300 couples.

“To me, marriage is something very special,” Austin said. “I reach a lot of people who never see the inside of the church, and I am able to help them.”

Said her friend, Donna Cameron: “She fits in anywhere. I think she’s really found her niche.”

Austin estimates that a quarter of the couples she unites are actually separated by a thick wall of safety glass in a correctional facility, with the grooms wearing handcuffs instead of cuff links.

“It was disappointing because we couldn’t touch,” said a 28-year-old Spring Valley woman who recently married her jailed boyfriend. “But (Austin’s) compassion and warmth made it just like any other wedding. She treated him like a human being despite the circumstances.”

Not long before he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, Austin married convicted triple-murderer Billy Ray Waldon to his Swedish girlfriend. Waldon chose a Christian ceremony.

“My heart really went out to him,” Austin said. “It was a very spiritual experience for the two of them.”

The concept of confidential marriages is not really new, just newly in vogue.

The licenses were legalized in 1878, state officials said, to allow pioneer couples who had little access to a minister to start families and quietly marry later.

Although speed is one of the main reasons people choose confidential licenses, state record-keepers said they also are widely used for concealing a marriage, avoiding costly blood tests and hiding the fact that children were born out of wedlock.

Today, the confidential wedding is skyrocketing in popularity, fueling a competitive quickie-wedding-chapel industry and sparking businesses such as Austin’s. In San Diego County, there are 33 people authorized to issue the licenses.

According to the state Department of Health Services, 1,290 of roughly 177,000 couples chose confidential marriages in 1972 in California. By 1985, 34% of marriages were confidential. By 1990, the number grew to 42%.

In San Diego County, nearly two-thirds of all marriages last year were confidential, the county recorder’s office said.

“I really believe people are trying to avoid the blood test. When I got mine, I fainted,” said one state official, who asked not to be named.

Some traditional wedding consultants chafe at the idea of spur-of-the-moment weddings.

“It doesn’t seem right to set the stage for a lifelong commitment with a spur-of-the-moment ceremony,” said Wilda Hyer, state coordinator of the Assn. of Bridal Consultants. “The spontaneousness doesn’t bode too well for the marriage.”

“Waiting is not a bad thing. Anything worth having is worth waiting for,” said Martha Cook, an El Cajon wedding consultant. “I cannot imagine any woman in her right mind who would not get a blood test.”

Ironically, while crisscrossing the county uniting others in holy wedlock, Austin herself is going through a painful divorce. The marriage began when she was 15 years old and lasted 43 rocky years.

“I still think marriage is one of the most wonderful institutions that has ever been,” she said. “It is wonderful when two people love each other.”