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Brad Ellsworth
I was born in Jasper, Indiana and lived in Huntingburg, Indiana until I was about 10. My parents raised my two brothers, a sister, and me.
We moved to Evansville, Indiana when my dad took a job at Alcoa in 1967. Jobs were hard to come by during those days, and he said he was lucky he got the one he did because it offered unlimited overtime. I remember how proud Dad was when he would come home and display to us kids a weekly pay stub with over 100 hours of actual work on it. In those days, Dad felt lucky to have an opportunity to work one hundred hours. That’s just how it was in those days: you went to work, did your job well, and saved every penny you could.
Growing up, my family lived in a small working class neighborhood on a dead-end street. My siblings, friends, and I could roam and play in the neighborhood as we pleased. We were safe. We were secure.
I graduated from Harrison High School in 1976 and from Indiana State University Evansville (now USI) in 1981. I worked at Wesselman's grocery store and in the hardware department at Sears to pay for it all. I just considered it an investment in my future.
We went to Church every Sunday.
I learned that church is about our faith, and that it is also about our community.
These lessons aren’t insignificant. They are important in this community and they are important in my family.
The lessons I learned in church have helped guide my life: Justice, Fairness, and helping everyday people. Those were the lessons I was taught to believe growing up and those are the lessons I have tried to teach my own daughter.
Beth & Andrea
After graduating from ISUE, I married my college sweetheart Beth. I came home from the Police Academy on a Friday, got married on a Saturday, honeymooned that night at the Executive Inn in Evansville, and then returned to the Academy on Sunday.
My marriage and the family I’ve built with Beth and our daughter, Andrea, are the things I’m most proud of in life.
A Career In Service
I became a deputy sheriff in 1982. I became a cop because I didn’t think it was fair that drug dealers could get rich while regular folks like my dad were working one hundreds hours a week.
Because I’d worked for a college degree, I had opportunities to rise through the ranks. I went back to school Friday nights and Saturday mornings and got a Masters degree in Criminology from Indiana State University in Terre Haute. The following year, I spent twelve weeks in Quantico, Virginia at the FBI National Academy. Looking back, the choices I made to further my education beyond high school gave me the tools I have needed to advance my career as a law enforcement official.
I was fortunate enough to spend two years as a D.A.R.E. officer, travelling to many schools and teaching kids about the danger of drugs and alcohol abuse. I tried to help take the lessons children learned from their parents at home and reinforce those lessons in the classroom.
I’ve been in law enforcement for almost 25 years now, and I can tell you that today we face challenges I would have never dreamed of back in 1982. My little dead-end street is a thing of the past. I understand better than most the dangers that threaten to break up our communities. The popular culture that assaults the values we try to teach our children:
- a meth lab cooking up drugs near a middle school;
- gangs moving in from the big cities because they smell an opportunity;
- TV shows and video games that glorify violence and sex as they compete to see who can show our kids the next provocative image.
Kids today don’t get to grow up the way we did. Because our jobs as parents is harder, it doesn't mean that we can give up teaching our kids the lessons we learned from our own parents.
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