A memorial has been held for the ‘Las Vegas Wedding Queen’ Charolette Richards, who founded the world-famous Little White Wedding Chapel.
Richards, who died at the age of 89 last month, pioneered the Las Vegas wedding industry and set up the iconic chapel – which numerous celebrities and lovers have got married at – in 1951.
She died on December 13 – but Sin City have vowed to make sure that her legacy lives on as hundreds gathered to say farewell.
January 25, the day of her memorial at her own Little White Wedding Chapel, was recognized as ‘Charolette Richards’ Day’ by County Commissioner Chairman Tick Segerblom.
Couples who decide to wed at the chapel walk through the renowned ‘Tunnel of Love’ after their nuptials – and now the street leading to this will be renamed ‘Charolette’s Way’ in her memory.
A memorial has been held for the ‘ Las Vegas Wedding Queen’ Charolette Richards, who founded the world-famous Little White Wedding Chapel
Charolette has presided over 500,000 weddings – including this unlikely pairing between a great Dane and a pug
Charolette Richards holds a photo of her with her ex- husband, Merle Richards
The Little White Chapel was once open 24 hours a day. In one day, Charolette performed 124 weddings
Melody Willis-Williams, president of Vegas Weddings and Little White Wedding Chapel, said: ‘Everyone in this industry, in the wedding industry in Las Vegas, knows exactly who Miss Charolette Richards is.
‘Her business model, a lot of the other chapels adapted in their own capacity.
‘Her name is renowned because she was the first of her kind in almost everything that she did. She’s the one they (would) look to to see what’s going to happen next.’
Richards invented the drive-thru wedding trend by complete accident one day, when a couple that wanted to wed in the chapel couldn’t fit inside the door because one of them was in a wheelchair.
Quick-witted Richards then married them outside – conceiving the notion of a drive-thru wedding chapel.
Michael Conti, who worked as a tribute Elvis at the chapel for 30 years, said: ‘She was the trailblazer of the wedding industry, and she was also known as the ‘Queen of the West/Universe,’ because she really started Vegas with the weddings.
‘It opens doors for a lot of the other wedding chapels.’
Charolette Richards, right, and part-time organist Rhoda Jones at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 2006
Charolette Richards, center, performs a wedding ceremony for Rafael Afonso and his bride, Anna Dacre
Charolette Richards, left, congratulates Bob Reeve, center, and his bride, Lori, both of Arena, Wis., after performing a drive-thru wedding ceromony at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 2006
Richards was most remembered for putting Las Vegas on the matrimonial map with the Elvis Pink Cadillac Ceremony, in which couples exchange their vows while sitting in or standing next to Richards’s own long 1971 pink Cadillac.
Its personalized plates proclaim 4ELVIS beneath a canopy emblazoned with the words THE TUNNEL OF LOVE flanked by two cartoon Cupids firing their arrows into the hot desert sky.
Ms. Charolette, as she was known, leaned over the couple waiting in the lobby of her Little White Wedding Chapel. She looked into their eyes and smiled.
‘I’ve only done this fifty thousand times,’ Richards would often say.
Some couples would ask if they can skip even the quickie ceremony and just pay for a marriage license. Others would show up drunk, barely able to stagger down the aisle.
But if people are too sloshed or impatient to say vows, Richards would turn them away. To her, the marriage ceremony was sacred, even if it only took ten minutes.
Love in Las Vegas, for Charolette Danielson Richards, started as a hurting thing. She was a young bride who ventured out west with three young sons at her side.
Wilson Wright, her wandering husband at the time, had sent her one hundred dollars and instructed her to drive their old Ford — ‘a jalopy,’ as she called it — from Sandy Hook, Kentucky, to Las Vegas, Nevada.
He asked to meet him at the Stardust Hotel and Casino, the newest and grandest resort on the Strip.
On June 10, 1959, smack in the middle of a blistering heat wave — with a record-setting number of days without rain, and with the highest temperature reaching one hundred thirteen degrees — Charolette pulled into town.
At this time, The Strip was becoming the main thoroughfare of a town still experiencing growing pains, a place where mobsters rub shoulders with cowboys, and where many of the casinos have Wild West themes, evoking the area’s frontier spirit.
Charolette Richards applauds from the drive-though window as Sasha Semenoff plays a violin in the background
Richards was most remembered for putting Las Vegas on the matrimonial map with the Elvis Pink Cadillac Ceremony, in which couples exchange their vows while sitting in or standing next to Richards’s own long 1971 pink Cadillac
The invention of the drive-through wedding meant couples didn’t even need to get out of their cars to get hitched
As Elvis reached down and grabbed Charolette’s hand to bring her onstage, she got the idea for an Elvis impersonator wedding. It was an instant hit, and couples flocked to the chapel
She arrived at Stardust, which was the largest hotel in the world at that point, with over one thousand rooms and a massive casino.
Wilson ‘Willy’ Wright had swept her off her feet when she was only seventeen years old, dishing up sundaes in an ice cream parlor in Eugene, Oregon.
He was said to be what was then called a ‘mechanic,’ a gambler who would prearrange the odds in his favor while he was at the table. Wright would saunter in to play in the card games upstairs, always taking the time to order a vanilla shake.
Months of milkshakes led to a proposal, and Charolette became a teenage bride, married by the justice of the peace.
Wright took her to live in a series of small towns, until finally, to lighten his load, he left his wife and kids at his parents’ home in Kentucky, and took off. ‘Mr. Wright,’ Charolette Richards later says, ‘was Mr. Wrong.’
Before long, an envelope arrived at the Sandy Hook post office, containing one hundred dollars in cash and instructions for Charolette to take the kids, drive across country, and meet her husband at the Stardust.
But when she finally arrived, her husband was nowhere to be found.
Using her last dollars, she rented a cheap motel room and spent the days and nights walking the Strip with her children in tow, scanning the crowds for any sign of Wright.
After a week of searching, her money was just about gone and the kids are screaming and there is no sign of her husband.
Then, just as she felt like she was about to fall to the pavement, sobbing and exhausted, a ‘very good-looking man’ on the street stopped and smiled at her.
The man introduces himself: Merle Richards, a photographer and the owner of the Little Church of the West wedding chapel.
He found her a place to stay and a babysitter for her kids and gave her a job at his wedding chapel adjacent to the Algiers Hotel on South Las Vegas Boulevard.
He picked her up every morning and drove her to work. There, inside the little chapel, Charolette made herself indispensable: taking payments, calling the ministers to perform the ceremonies, keeping the books.
A few months after her arrival in Vegas, Wilson Wright reappeared, hoping to reconcile. He hadn’t intended to abandon her and the kids on the street, he explained. He’d just been unable to find them. But Charolette is ready to call it quits.
She hitched her star to Merle Richards and his wedding business. Both eventually formally divorce their respective spouses and marry each other.
Her new husband wasn’t a gambler like Wright, but he has his own demons.
After ten years, her marriage to Merle was over.
Soon after, she was an ordained minister, ready to perform her first wedding.
She told the couple: ‘You’re the first people I’ve married, so excuse me if I make a mistake.
Recalling the first time, she said: ‘I was proud once I got through, and I started doing those weddings like they were candy.’
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