By Lisa Mascaro

Sun, Apr 13, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Washington — One of the first people who checked out the Hank Greenspun exhibit on opening day was Ray Brady, a lifelong District of Columbia resident who knew all about the founding Las Vegas Sun editor.

Brady spent a career with the former International Typographical Union, the printers guild that started the newspaper that would become the Sun. In Washington, where Brady worked, printers knew all about Greenspun’s efforts to work with the union.

Brady, 76, said he had always wanted to be a reporter. He loved words and reading. But he just couldn’t write.

Instead he became a union proofreader and worked at nearly every paper in the Washington area.

When one of his papers merged with another in 1954, he was at the dentist getting a tooth pulled.

“Not only was I losing a tooth, I was losing my job.”

He got hired at another paper. His career spanned nearly four decades before he retired in 1989.

“The best catch I ever made proofreading,” Brady offered, was when Pope Pius XII was sick. It was the 1950s.

He recalled:

The reporter wrote that the pope believed he was about to die. But when he began to recover, the reporter wrote, “The pope was saved for Catholicism.”

But that wasn’t exactly what the scribe put down. “He wrote, ‘saved from Catholicism.’ ”

Brady broke into a proud smile.

“I often thought: What would’ve happened if I didn’t catch it?”