In his nearly 20 years on the Miami-Dade Police Department's bomb squad, Newt Porter never met an explosive device he couldn't disarm.

Souvenir military ordnance and terrorists' pipe bombs, plastic explosives and rusty mines -- he rendered them all harmless with a deft touch, and encyclopedic knowledge of chemical reactions.

He led the county's bomb squad for five years, and spent part of the 1980s as a crime lab criminalist.

After retiring to Telford, Tenn., in 1987, he continued to teach bomb-disposal techniques to local police and at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.

Porter died July 19 at an Ocala hospital, having survived his wife of 55 years, Patricia M. Porter, by just three months.

He had been her primary caregiver as she suffered from, an ultimately succumbed to, congestive heart failure, said their son, Newton P. Porter.

A lethal stroke felled the elder Porter while he was making the rounds of his four children, 10 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Newton Edward Porter, born June 22, 1928, in Haverhill, Mass., was 82, a University of Miami graduate and member of UM's Iron Arrow honor society.

JOINED IN '68

The cigar-chomping Navy veteran of two wars -- as well as a one-time government meteorologist and chemistry teacher -- joined the police department in 1968, shortly before Miami erupted in politically motivated violence.

Porter's training officer, retired bomb squad buddy Tom Carroll, said from the beginning he realized that ``Newt forgot more than I'd ever know. . .He was one of the most fascinating people I ever knew. . . I'd never seen a man gather intelligence like he could.''

During the 1970s, the county was under siege from ``Cuban exile terrorists,'' as The Miami Herald called various shadowy groups, keeping Porter and his colleagues in what was then called the Dade County Public Safety Department, hopping.

``These guys think they are patriots, but they're really just nuts,'' Porter told the newspaper at the time. ``So far, they haven't killed anybody, but. . .it was close.''

A frequent Officer of the Month winner and Officer of the Year once, ``he feared no one and nothing,'' Carroll said.

In the line of duty, Porter captured an armed suspect in a fatal shooting, and nabbed a man escaping from a jail holding cell.

1975 EVENT

The year 1975 saw a plethora of bombings, successful and attempted, related to the fate of fugitive anti-Castro exile bomb-maker Humberto Lopez, Jr.

Convicted in Miami, Lopez fled to the Dominican Republic. Police said that a group called Young Men of the Star retaliated after the Dominican government handed him over to U.S. authorities.

On Oct. 20, 1975, Porter disarmed a pipe bomb outside the Dominican Airlines office that he described as ``something like eight pounds of dynamite. That's a serious bomb. And it would have taken out every window in that building.''

After the incident, a Miami Herald editorial declared that, ``Greater Miami surely has no braver men than the Metro bomb squad, whose members at great risk protect the public from the acts of fanatics. . . . One such act this week by bomb disposal officer Newton Porter at the Dominicana Airlines office is typical and may have saved lives.''

Weeks later, Porter dismantled a two-pound can of plastic explosives wired to blasting caps, batteries and a wristwatch, and placed in an airplane lavatory at Miami International Airport.