Thomas Graham Brodie was a Miami-Dade County bomb-squad pioneer whose death-defying exploits earned him international acclaim, a network game-show appearance and some serious burns.

``There's only one trick to this job,'' he told The Miami Herald in 1970. ``You take the bomb apart; don't let it take you apart.''

Brodie died Aug. 13, limbs intact, at age 78.

Afflicted with Parkinson's disease, he'd spent his final year at an assisted-living facility near his childhood home in the Redland, where his grandfather settled in 1920, lending his name to an area called Brodie's Corner.

In 1955, Tom Brodie joined the Dade County Sheriff's Road Patrol. By 1963, that had become the Dade County Public Safety Department and Brodie -- a Miami Senior High School and University of Miami graduate -- its youngest captain.

A U.S. Air Force and Florida National Guard veteran, he helped shape the contemporary Miami-Dade Police Department bomb squad, and was a founding member of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators: IABTI.

He appeared on To Tell the Truth, a bygone game show featuring a celebrity panel that had to determine which of three contestants was the ``real'' Tom Brodie.

Brodie worked many of the high-profile cases that by 1974 had made Miami what he called ``one of the terrorist capitals of the world.''

During the 1960s and '70s, political passions frequently boiled over into violence -- a subject about which Brodie testified before Congress. In 1968 alone, 44 bombs went off in Miami, including one aboard the ship Caribbean Venture docked in Miami during the Republican convention.

During that era, Cuban-American radio host Emilio Milián lost his legs in a car bombing. Explosives detonated at four federal buildings, at the homes of the British consul and a magazine editor who advocated dialogue with Fidel Castro and in a Metro Justice Building restroom.

Saboteurs with various agendas tried to blow up a Bahamasair jet at Miami International Airport, a University of Miami-area apartment, a Jamaican anti-drug official's rented car, a Bird Road shopping plaza, the Torch of Friendship, and an anti-gay rights activist's office.

In nearly every case, Tom Brodie disarmed a dangerous device or investigated an incident's aftermath.

He'd use such low-tech tools as broomsticks, ballpoint pens, pocketknives and string to dismantle deadly devices.

``Every bomb is different, and so is the way you handle it,'' he told The Herald. ``You don't think about the chance of the bomb going off. You just think about defusing it. Otherwise you'd go crazy.''

HONORED BY QUEEN

In 1968, Brodie plunged into Miami's harbor to remove a bomb attached to the English cargo ship Lancastrian Prince's hull. The following year, by diplomatic proxy in Washington, D.C., a grateful Queen Elizabeth II inducted him into the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Brodie was a respected writer on the subject of explosives. His Bombs and Bombings: A Handbook to Protection, Security, Disposal, And Investigation for Industry, Police and Fire Departments, published in 1995, remains in use by law-enforcement departments -- as does a version of the truck-mounted disposal apparatus that he co-invented in the 1960s. Son Steve Brodie, a lieutenant with Miami Fire-Rescue, calls it ``basically a giant cannon.''