This morning Adams County Sheriff Tommy Ferrell is dressed in a suit and tie. A brown uniform hangs under a dry-cleaning bag in the corner. Tonight he will wear bluejeans to a wild game supper. Tomorrow evening, a tuxedo to a Mardi Gras party.

For Ferrell, the chameleon wardrobe represents an active involvement in the community he serves – a community that voted him in for a fourth consecutive term in 1999 – and an involvement that he learned from his father.

“You’ve got to be available. My daddy said if somebody took the time to call you, you call them back,” Ferrell said.

Ferrell’s father, Billy Ferrell, was first elected Adams County sheriff in 1959. Because the law at the time would not allow sheriffs to serve consecutive terms, the elder Ferrell served one term, then returned four years later to lead the Adams County Sheriff’s Office until his son took over in 1987.

The pair is one of only two consecutive father-son successions in the country, and the only one in Mississippi history.

Tommy Ferrell’s grandfather was also an Adams County deputy. His mother, Hazel, served without pay under her husband until the state allowed women as deputies.

The sheriff’s son now works as a federal agent for the U.S. Border Patrol in the Southwest. His daughter is an attorney in Tennessee.

“They didn’t get the bug for the badge and the gun,” Ferrell said of his children.

Actually, Ferrell prefers to think of his following in his father’s footsteps as a profession.

“I look at this as a profession, just like a doctor’s son becoming a doctor, or a lawyer’s son becoming a lawyer,” Ferrell said.

After being exposed to law enforcement all his life, it is only natural that he be interested in it himself, he said.

Ferrell was a young teen when his father became sheriff, but he had practically grown up at the jail while his father worked there as a deputy.

“The old saying is I cut my teeth on a badge,” he said.

And that may not be far from the truth, said Hazel Ferrell, who confers the jail was like a second home to the family.

“We’d all say we’re going down to the jail, or so-and-so is up at the jail,” she said. “And people would just look at us. But it was all we knew.”

Sheriff Ferrell also remembers time spent with both his parents at the county jail, now restored and home to the Adams County Board of Supervisors’ office.

“It wasn’t uncommon for us to say to our friends after school or on weekends to meet me over at the jail,” said. “That sounds kind of harsh to people today, but that’s the way we were raised.”

Even when Ferrell himself was a deputy under his father, his own two children visited the jail. In fact, his son learned to walk on the dining hall table under the careful support of a trusty holding his hand.

But Hazel Ferrell admits she found it difficult to support her only son when he decided to carry on the family’s profession.

She had already spent many sleepless nights worrying for her husband’s safety and knew what kind of life was ahead for her son.

But she soon realized neither she nor her son had much choice in the matter.

“It just gets in your blood,” she said. “He just had to do it.”

And while she recognizes traits of her late husband in her son – “you can hear them talking on the radio and (they) sound just alike” – Mrs. Ferrell is proud to say Tommy has carved his own name in the family’s history of public service.

“He’s done it on his own,” she said. “He’s made his own mark.”

Ferrell too is quick to say he is his father’s son, from their similar writing style to the way they view the political balance required for the office of sheriff.

“I’ve been accused of being just like him,” he said.

But perhaps more than any other trait, Ferrell appreciates his father’s innovative thinking and desire to find new ways to interweave technology and law enforcement.

“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “I’ve seen this agency grow.”

From his grandfather’s battle with bootleggers, his father’s tumultuous years during the Civil Rights era, to the drug crimes of today, his family has experienced the full gamut of law enforcement, he said.

“We’ve seen the complete evolution of law enforcement from the early days to today,” Ferrell said.

Actually, the Ferrell name fills much of the plaque that hangs on a back wall of the old jail listing the names of the sheriffs since the first in 1798.

“Of that 200 years, my father and I have been sheriff for 40 of them,” Ferrell said.

“It’s been a lifetime of experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything.”