At age 2, Rebecca Veeck was the youngest greeter for the St. Paul Saints.
From inside her playpen, she enthusiastically greeted — often several times in a row — anyone who walked through the door of the baseball team's front office.
Veeck, the daughter of Saints owner and president Mike Veeck, spent her early childhood roaming the ballpark and making friends. Longtime fans may remember her wearing matching tutus with the team's mascot, a pig, to deliver baseballs to the home plate umpire.
That was before she was diagnosed at age 7 with a degenerative eye condition that rapidly turned her blind. And it was years before doctors discovered that she was actually dealing with a much worse, rare genetic condition called Batten disease. On Sept. 30, Rebecca Veeck died. She was 27.
She was born Dec. 12, 1991. Rather than put her in day care, her parents, Mike and Libby Veeck, kept her around the Saints' offices. She endeared herself to nearly everyone she met, her father recalls, with her sense of humor and "consuming hunger for life."
After the family moved to Florida in 1998, Rebecca had a wellness check where she couldn't read the "E" atop the eye chart. The doctor said she had retinitis pigmentosa; her vision was disappearing from the center, marching outward. "Hearing that diagnosis destroyed us as a family," Mike Veeck said. "But then we saw all these heroes — parents and the children — who were going through this and had gotten support."
After all, they told themselves, it wasn't life-threatening. Rebecca was resilient and wouldn't let others feel bad for her. She turned her attention to other people and the activities that brought her joy: dancing, horseback riding, art, making people laugh.
Her father spent most of 1999 taking her to see majestic places around the United States and the world before her eyesight was completely gone. She saw the Grand Canyon covered in snow and the green hills of Ireland and drove the Pacific Coast Highway sitting on her father's lap in a convertible — top down, of course.
