Dr. Frank J. Brady Sr., a lover of photography, woodworking and astronomy who was the head of anesthesiology at Maryland General Hospital for three decades, died Monday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease at his home in Towson. He was 84.

Born in Baltimore in 1918, he was sent to the Hershey Industrial School in Pennsylvania, a school for orphaned boys, after the death of his father.

In a brief autobiography that he wrote in the 1960s, Dr. Brady recalled leaving the school with a dream of studying medicine.

"When I left Hershey, my possessions were an education, a trunk full of clothes and $100.00 to my credit at the school, which was money I was to receive when I was twenty-one years of age, or earlier if I needed it for my education," he typed.

"He had no ego. He didn't really like people to refer to him as Doctor - he was just Bud. He just saved lives, and then came home and he was Dad," said his son, Frank Joseph Brady Jr. of Towson.

In the autobiography, Dr. Brady describes the many jobs he held to pay for college and medical school.

There were stints at the post office, delivering telegrams as a Western Union boy and in the bottling room at Western Maryland Dairy.

His earnings helped him attend Washington College in Chestertown, from which he graduated in 1941 with a bachelor of science degree.

"At graduation exercises, I received a surprise when I was presented with an award, which I did not realize existed - the Ilma Catlin award for 'Scholarship, Leadership and Character,'" he wrote.

He completed the medical program at the University of Maryland in the fall of 1944. Around the same time, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps.

While he was on inactive duty and working a rotating internship at Maryland General Hospital in Baltimore, he met a student nurse named Nellie Buck. The couple married two years later and moved to Fort Dix.

In 1949, Dr. Brady began his residency training in anesthesiology at University Hospital in Baltimore, the teaching hospital of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Six years later, he was asked to run the anesthesiology department of Maryland General Hospital.

It was a post Dr. Brady held until he retired in 1980.

Dr. Brady was a member of numerous professional organizations, including the Baltimore City Medical Society, the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the International Anesthesia Research Society.

He was president of the Pleximeter Club, which he described as "a semi-scientific, semi-social group of physicians in Baltimore."

Dr. Brady, who played the sousaphone in high school and who remained passionate about classical music, died listening to a broadcast of symphonic music on a local radio station.

He is also survived by a daughter, Virginia Lee Brady of Catonsville; brothers Kenneth Oliver Brady of Florida, and Sherwin Lee Brady of Virginia; and a sister, Dorothy Jeanette Pearce of Frederick. Two sisters, Claire LeCompte and Flordred Brady, preceded him in death.

Services will be held at 2 p.m. today at Ruck Towson Funeral Home, 1050 York Road.

The family suggests that memorial donations be made to the Alzheimer's Association or to Parkinson's disease research.