From Coast To Coast: Carol Prevo’s Loving Dedication To Her Husband Remains The Same

Jerry Prevo was “the guy next door,” but Carol Sherwood, at the time, was dating another guy up the hill. 

“I didn’t know this,” Carol Prevo said. “He tells me that the guy on the hill came down and told him, ‘You better leave my girlfriend alone,’ and that was a challenge to him, and you know who won.”

After 56 years of marriage, it takes both of them to tell the story of their first date.

“It was the last day of (freshman year), and we were all going to a park to celebrate the end of school. Me and my buddy were sitting there… that doesn’t sound right,” Jerry Prevo said.

“Yeah, I don’t like your version,” Carol Prevo said.

“We wanted to invite some girls to go with us. She and her sister walked out,” Jerry Prevo said.

“And another girl,” Carol Prevo said.

“It was you and your sister, wasn’t it?” Jerry Prevo said.

“And Ella Sue,” Carol Prevo said.

“Well, she and her sister basically walked out, and I said to my buddy, ‘I’ll take Carol and you can have her sister.’ So, we invited them to go and that was our first date,” Jerry Prevo said.

The couple have been together ever since, trusting God as He took them from Tennessee to Missouri, to Alaska and now to Lynchburg, Virginia, to lead Liberty University.

After they both graduated from Oliver Springs High School, Jerry Prevo took engineering classes at the University of Tennessee. However, he felt God calling him to ministry and wanted to attend Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. Not wanting to leave his girlfriend, they decided to get married.

On a Wednesday night after a service, a young bride in her $19 white dress joined her fiance in front of the congregation and were married. There was not a reception but a church full of well-wishers as the two embarked on their journey to Missouri that evening. 

Carol Prevo took classes in business at BBC, but had to stop and work full time to help financially and allow Jerry Prevo to complete his degree. After graduating from BBC, Jerry Prevo became assistant pastor at a church in Nashville and later took a pastor position at a church in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, near where they grew up and near their families. 

But three years later, God called Jerry Prevo to take over a mission, and Carol Prevo found herself on the Alcan highway and its 1,500 miles of gravel road heading to a small congregation and their new home in Anchorage, Alaska. 

“The second day on that gravel road, my wife looked at me and said, ‘Where in the world are you taking me?’ She’d never been there,” Jerry Prevo said. “I said, ‘Honey, I promise you, at the end of this road there’s a McDonald’s and a JCPenney.’”

Nearly 24 hours of darkness in the winter, cold weather and snow also awaited the young couple in Alaska. 

“I’m not a cold weather person, let me put it that way. I freeze all the time,” Carol Prevo said. “I can’t stand boots. But someone told me when we first went to Alaska that you better get some boots on or you’re going to fall down and hurt your neck. So, I went out and bought me some boots and still fell down. I didn’t break my neck but out went the boots.”

In the 47 years that Jerry Prevo was pastor at Anchorage Baptist Temple, the church grew from the small mission to a congregation of thousands. The church added a television and radio station that spread the gospel and formed the Anchorage Christian Schools that now educates students from preschool to high school. Carol Prevo served as a secretary at the Anchorage Christian Schools working with finances in the registrar’s office. 

Since they were thousands of miles from home, the church became their family. 

“God makes you content wherever you go if you’re in his will,” Carol Prevo said. “And he just made me content.”

The two filled their time in Alaska with adventures. With church members, they would go out to a camp where the pipeline workers stayed and raced down hills on large innertubes and snowmobiles. In the summer, they enjoyed the nearly 24 hours of daylight by playing baseball at midnight and tug-of-war in the creek to wash off.

Jerry Prevo also got his pilot’s license and began hunting and fishing in Alaska. Though he usually went with his son, Carol Prevo joined on a few occasions, shooting her own black bear. Carol Prevo has caught larger fish than her husband on fishing trips, a fact that Dr. Jerry Falwell Sr., a friend of Jerry Prevo’s, loved to joke about when he would come to Alaska to visit and go salmon fishing. 

In 1996, Falwell asked Jerry Prevo to be on the Liberty University Board of Trustees and in 2003, he became the Board Chairman. 

Just over a year following Jerry Prevo’s retirement as pastor of Anchorage Baptist Temple, Carol Prevo was hardly surprised when he agreed to take over as acting president of Liberty University.

“I thought if that’s what God wants you to do, that’s what we’ll do,” Carol said. “I’ve always followed him.”

Though the move to Virginia brought warmer weather, Carol never quite got used to the cold in Alaska and frequently wears her puffy winter jacket. She misses her friends in Alaska. Some have come to visit the Prevo’s in their temporary home in the Montview Mansion near the Welcome Center. But Carol Prevo feels at home at Liberty.

“The students are great,” Carol Prevo said. “They’re so friendly. Everyone’s been so friendly, so nice, so kind. We like to get out and walk around and meet the students as much as we can.”

Liberty is their next adventure and, like her husband, Carol Prevo hopes to help the university continue building Falwell’s vision.

“I would like to see the Champions for Christ that Dr. Falwell talked about a lot,” Carol Prevo said. “That’s what it’s all about anyway. Pointing people to Jesus Christ.”

Jacqueline Hale is the Feature Editor. Follow her on Twitter at @HaleJacquelineR.