STILL SEEING BLUE : Bill Veeck’s Granddaughter Gets Special Look Into Baseball Hall of Fame

Rebecca Veeck, 8, went to Cooperstown to see her grandfather. Looking at a photograph of Bill Veeck with Larry Doby, she took off her sunglasses and asked, “Which one is Grandpa?”

Mike Veeck knew it was a matter of light and shadow. His daughter is losing her sight. Her eyes were slow to adjust to the room’s brightness. Black was white, and white was black. And if for only a moment, the colors were the same--Which one is Grandpa? Mike Veeck recognized that moment. “A lovely thought,” he said.

He took his daughter to baseball’s Hall of Fame because her grandpa earned a place there, and he wanted her to see it while she can. At home, she had seen pictures of her daddy’s daddy. What a man Bill Veeck was, robust and roaring in laughter, even about the wooden leg replacing one lost in war. Just two things to be afraid of, he said: “fire and termites.”

“Look, Daddy, Grandpa’s got two feet,” Rebecca Veeck said at Cooperstown. The old man she had seen in pictures she now saw as a young man. The wizened face was unlined. The little girl saw her grandpa for the first time with two feet. She saw him with Larry Doby, who came from the Negro National League to play for Veeck’s Indians.

Now a Hall of Famer alongside his old boss, Doby came to Cooperstown with Rebecca and her father, because of all the wonders Bill Veeck did as owner/president/marketer, what he did best was look at black and white and see those colors as the same.

Doby saw Rebecca see her grandfather, and he heard her ask, “Where’s the exploding scoreboard?” Bill Veeck’s ballparks sparkled with circuses and fireworks. Rebecca’s question and laugh resonated with Doby: “She’s like a chip off the old block. You see it in her, the same qualities that her grandfather had.”

It’s the family trade. Rebecca’s first baseball job was to recline in her bassinet until called on; then she’d sit up and say hi to folks entering her daddy’s ballpark. She was not yet talking when she first sang, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” At 6, she handed out schedules and announced lineups.

In 1917, the sportswriter William Veeck Sr. wrote articles telling Cubs Owner William Wrigley how to run his forlorn organization. Wrigley hired him. Until his death in 1933, the reformed writer nudged the Cubs toward respectability.

Then his son, a college graduate without a job, went to work for the Cubs at $18 a week as an office boy reporting to Phil Wrigley, the son of the man who had hired his father.

Bill Veeck and his father had intended to start a small-town newspaper. But during the Depression, an $18 salary was a powerful lure. Veeck soon discovered he loved the world inside a ballpark. For 50 more years, he taught us to love it.

Happily, Mike Veeck is his father’s son. Would anyone other than a Veeck train a half-ton pig named Hambino to deliver baseballs to the home plate umpire? Offer a free vasectomy to a lucky man at a Father’s Day game? Celebrate “Two Dead Fat Guys Day” on Aug. 16, the date on which Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley died?

He was able to do such fun and foolishness because he did it for a good boss: himself. With ownership interests in five minor league teams from South Carolina to South Dakota, Veeck, now 48, calls himself “a minor league guy. I’ll go to my grave a minor league guy.”

He forgot that for a minute. In October 1998, he took a major league job as vice president of sales and marketing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

That same month, Rebecca went in for an eye examination and couldn’t see the big E on the chart.

“We thought she was goofin’ because that’s the kind of fun kid she is,” Veeck says. “But we found out she’d been living in shadows her whole life.”

The diagnosis was retinitis pigmentosa. How long Rebecca will see, no one can say, but the disease often moves rapidly.

One Sunday morning this spring, Rebecca said, “Daddy, look at the sky. How blue.”

Veeck had worked eight months of marathon days trying to sell baseball to a Florida audience not buying. He also had worked for another reason. “But you can’t work hard enough,” he says, “to forget you’re this afraid.”

So when your daughter, going blind, has to remind you how blue the sky is, it’s time to be a daddy. This summer, Veeck quit the Devil Rays and now wants Rebecca to see everything. She saw Grandpa at Cooperstown. Soon she’ll see Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.

Veeck and his wife, Libby, talked to Rebecca about making her story public. She said no; kids already made fun of her sunglasses. She changed her mind when her parents said bringing attention to The Foundation Fighting Blindness might help other children.

Recent tests show Rebecca’s eyesight improved a little, the deterioration slowing, though still inevitable. Researchers hope that medicine, gene therapy and even computer-chip implants someday will restore vision to patients with Rebecca’s disease.

“I treasure this time with Rebecca,” Mike Veeck says. “I’m a different person than I was a year ago. While I suffer fools easily because I am one, I no longer am able to see the loss of 20 Devil Rays season tickets as ‘a failure of tragic proportions.’ ”

The baseball man says he now knows what’s important. He knows what makes him cry.