Midwesterner Thomas Howard Gerard was an army veteran with degrees in engineering and business administration when he moved to Miami Beach after World War II -- to be a ``beach bum,'' his wife said.

But his life of leisure ended after a buddy got a job selling air conditioners and persuaded him to do the same, launching Gerard's career as one of the coolest guys in South Florida.

Son James Gerard, of North Miami, said his father installed air conditioning ``in all of the large hotels on Miami Beach: the Doral Beach, Seacoast Towers, the Crystal House,'' also The Famous, a landmark Beach eatery on Washington Avenue.

He went on to establish TIF Instruments, a Miami company that produced industry-standard devices for servicing air conditioners, and employed 450 people by the time he sold it in 1997.

Gerard died in hospice care at his Keystone Point home in North Miami on Aug. 20. He was 87 and suffered from a rare, Parkinson's-like disease called MSA, multisystem atrophy, said Suzanne Lasky Gerard, his wife of eight years.

Gerard's first wife, Judith Krensky Gerard, the mother of his two sons, died of cancer in 1968. He also outlived a younger brother, William.

Air conditioning, which would transform South Florida in the 1950s, was still a rarity when Gerard got involved. In 1948, only 74,000 window units were sold nationwide.

Gerard launched Miami Beach Air Conditioning on Alton Road, but gradually ``the workshop began to overtake the store,'' as her husband realized ``there was nobody to fix'' the units, said Suzanne.

He moved first to Hialeah then to a warehouse factory at Northwest 95th Street and Seventh Avenue, shifting the company's focus from air conditioning to testing instruments, developed with his older brother, retired San Diego physics professor Leonard Leibermann.

Perhaps the best-known: the Tif-TectorT, the first portable electronic refrigerant leak detector when the brothers launched it in 1964. It remains widely used.

The Gerards had the coolest house in town, said James, a real-estate investor. Headed home from William Jennings Bryan Elementary School, North Miami middle and high schools, his friends ``would stop over to have a quick drink and cool down.''

He called his father ``charming, witty and shrewd,'' a man who embraced mental exercises like crossword puzzles and brains-over-brawn solutions to disputes.

In a eulogy, son John Gerard, a San Diego physician, recalled how his father helped him disarm a Dorito-stealing schoolyard bully. ``The next day we spiked another bag with hot mustard [powder] and sealed it up using an iron,'' John said. Then he laughed as the bully and his pals battled the fire in their mouths.

GOING TO WAR

Tom Gerard was born Thomas Howard Liebermann in Ironwood, Mich., and grew up in a kosher home. Relatives say he changed his last name to his mother's maiden name before going to war -- a decision that some Jewish fighting men made when faced with the Nazis' vow to wipe out Jewish life.

But the army sent Gerard to the Phillipines, where he taught soldiers how to drive Jeeps and heavy equipment.

He'd already earned an engineering degree from the University of Colorado; after the war, he got an MBA from the University of Chicago. Leonard Leibermann, who taught at the University of California/San Diego, helped his brother invent many of TIF's devices.

``I'd make suggestions and he'd get them fabricated,'' Liebermann said.

When son John was 6 and James was 11, their mother died.

``It was a terrible blow'' to his brother, Liebermann said, but he vowed to raise the boys by himself because ``he didn't want them to have a stepmother.''

COOL DAD

Gerard's backup on the homefront: a live-in housekeeper named Leila Singleton, now dead, who had full disciplinary authority. Yet he was always there to give his sons advice, John said.

Knowing that his father would love him no matter what ``meant a lot when. . .I came to terms with who I was'' as a gay man, John said, ``especially since so many other friends ended up shunned by thier families. . . He made our house almost like a safe haven, a judgement-free zone.''

In 1997, Gerard sold his $18 million company to United Dominion Industries (United Dominion sold to SPX Corp, which maintains the TIF brand).

He and Suzanne were a couple for 16 years, married in 2001, and together, accumulated homeless dogs, three of whom remain.

They custom-built a log cabin in North Carolina that Tom Gerard got to enjoy last summer. After that, his illness quickly progressed.

A connoiseur of Scotch whiskey, Gerard took the taste of Johnny Walker Black to the grave. Just hours before he died, he was able to suck on a cotton swab dipped in his favorite beverage.

``He got a glint in his eye,'' son James said.

He was entombed with the ashes of his beloved dog, Video.