Regional Oral History Office University of California the Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project

Sam Dardick

Cofounder of the FREED Center for Independent Living, Grass Valley, California

Interviews conducted by Sharon Bonney in 2007

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Sam Dardick, dated May 21, 2007. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Sam Dardick, “Cofounder of the FREED Center for Independent Living, Grass Valley, California” conducted by Sharon Bonney in 2007, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2008.

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Sam Dardick, 2007 iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This phase of the Bancroft Library's Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project was funded by DBTAC-Pacific ADA, as part of a study of “Antecedents, Implementation, and Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act.” Additional funds came from a generous donation from Professor Raymond Lifchez in 2006 in honor of Susan O’Hara.

Thanks are due to other donors to this project over the years: Dr. Henry Bruyn, June A. Cheit, Claire Louise Englander, Judith Stronach, the Prytanean Society, and the Sol Waxman and Tina P. Waxman Family Foundation. The Bancroft Library’s disability history program was launched with field-initiated research grants in 1996 and 2000 from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research [NIDRR], Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, U.S. Department of Education. Any of the views expressed in the oral history interviews or accompanying materials are not endorsed by the sponsoring agencies.

Discursive Table of Contents—Sam Dardick

Series History vi

Interview History xiv

Interview 1: May 21, 2007

Audio File 1 1

Early childhood in St. Louis: on-set of polio in 1948, high school and college experiences as a disabled student—Graduate school at University of California, Berkeley in City Planning, super jock mentality, initial awareness of disability rights—Participation in the civil rights movement in the early sixties—First meeting with Ed Roberts, basketball with University of Illinois Gizz Kids—City of Berkeley denies internship job based on disability—Dislikes US politics, tours Europe and works in India for several years, lives with guru.

Interview 2: June 18, 2008

Audio File 2 17

Ed Roberts pushes Sam to work in the independent living movement— Establishment of FREED Center for Independent Living, discussion of service provision, Posh Nosh restroom incident—FREED joins CFILC and Sam becomes president—ADA activities and relationship with Justin Dart—APTA demonstration 1987—ADA White House signing in Washington, DC— Reflections on life as a person with a disability—Thoughts on Tony Sauer selected as director of California Department of Rehabilitation—Farming from a wheelchair. vi

SERIES HISTORY by Ann Lage

Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project

Historical Framework

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolutionary shift in the worldview and legal status of people with disabilities. In major cities across the United States, people with disabilities began in the 1960s and 1970s to assert their rights to autonomy and self-determination and to reject the prejudices and practices that kept them stigmatized, isolated, and often confined to institutions or inaccessible homes under the care of family members.

Within a few years of each other, groups of people—usually young, often with a university connection, and frequently wheelchair users with significant physical disabilities—formed organizations in Berkeley, New York, Boston, Denver, St. Louis, Houston and elsewhere to foster independent living in the community and to advocate for laws and policies to remove barriers to autonomy. Characterizing these groups, which formed relatively independently of each other, was the evolution of a new core set of beliefs that gave a distinctive character to this emerging disability rights and independent living movement. Their members came to insist on self-determination and control over their organizations. They resolved to make changes in their own lives and in society. And as they engaged in political actions, they began to recognize the shared experience of discrimination and oppression among groups with diverse disabilities.

Very quickly, informal regional and national networks of activists developed, often including people with a range of disabilities, who shared information about the nuts and bolts of funding, peer counseling, and service delivery. They joined together to advocate for essential personal assistance services and for the removal of architectural and transportation barriers. These networks were formalized in national organizations, such as the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (founded in 1975), and national gatherings, such as the 1977 White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals, which served in turn as catalysts for national and grassroots organizing on a cross- disability basis.

From the beginning, the movement was a part of the activist and countercultural climate of the times, evolving within the context of civil rights demonstrations, antiwar protests, and the emerging women’s and gay rights movements. Early leaders such as Judith Heumann, Fred Fay, Ed Roberts, Lex Frieden, and a host of others conceptualized their issues as a political movement, a struggle for the civil rights of people with disabilities. A wide-ranging group of activists absorbed this civil rights consciousness and cross- disability awareness during a series of defining political actions, such as the nationwide sit-ins and demonstrations in 1977, organized to demand the issuance of regulations for section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and during the subsequent peer trainings on the rights of people with disabilities, which were carried out nationwide. vii

As the political movement grew, the new cadre of activists made connections with the emerging parents’ movement and its efforts to free people with developmental disabilities from the massive and dehumanizing state institutions of the time. A series of landmark federal lawsuits, most notably PARC v. Pennsylvania (1972) and Mills v. Board of Education (1972), established for the first time a right to a public school education for children with disabilities. Alliances and coalitions also developed with a number of traditional, disability-specific organizations, which were themselves undergoing changes during this period.

New organizations devoted to pursuing legal and legislative reforms, such as the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (1979), ADAPT, a grassroots direct-action organization (1983), and a growing number of other local, state, and national disability organizations and alliances profoundly influenced national policy in education, transportation, employment, and social services. Their best known legislative victory was the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which, although compromised by subsequent court decisions, offered broad civil rights protection for disabled Americans and has served as a beacon for the creation of disability rights legislation in fifty other countries.

Less concrete than the legislative accomplishments and legal cases, and still evolving, is the shift in attitudes and consciousness that was driven by, and has transformed the lives of, people with a wide variety of physical and mental disabilities, challenging the notion of disability as stigma and instead embracing disability as a normal facet of human diversity. Theoreticians and artists with disabilities play a prominent role in defining and communicating concepts of disability community and disability culture, and academicians are promoting disability as a category of cultural and historical analysis.

These achievements, as significant as they are, have not ended the discrimination or the prejudice. Indeed, the first years of the twenty-first century have seen several Supreme Court decisions which have limited the expected scope and effectiveness of disability rights law, and many disabled Americans remain economically and socially marginalized. While the need for change continues, the tremendous accomplishments of the disability rights and independent living movement cannot be denied. American society has been profoundly transformed, and any accurate account of the social and political landscape of the late twentieth century will acknowledge the contributions of disability rights and independent living activists.

Project Design, Interviewees

The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project at the Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, preserves, through oral history interviews, the firsthand accounts of the activists who have made significant contributions to the origins and achievements of this movement. The Bancroft Library also collects, preserves, and provides access to the papers of organizations and individuals who have been a part of the struggles for disability rights and independent living. All of the oral history texts, finding aids to the archival records, and selections viii

from the archival papers and images are available on the Internet, as part of the Online Archive of California, California Digital Library.

The first phase of the project, completed in 2000, documented the movement during its formative years in Berkeley, California. Berkeley was the site where the concept of independent living was most clearly articulated and institutional models developed, originally by and for students on the Berkeley campus and soon after in the community, with the founding of the nation’s first independent living center in 1972. These organizations and their dynamic leaders, together with the activist tradition in the Bay Area and a disability-friendly climate, made Berkeley an important center of the disability movement and a natural focus for Phase I of the project.

During Phase I, Regional Oral History Office interviewers recorded forty-six oral histories with Berkeley leaders, many of whom have also been figures on the national scene. The Bancroft Library collected personal papers of interviewees and others in the disability community and archival records of key disability organizations, such as the Center for Independent Living, the World Institute on Disability, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and the Center for Accessible Technology.

Phase II of the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project (2000-2004) expanded the oral history research and the collection of archival material to document the growth of the movement nationwide. The project again focused on those leaders whose activism began in the 1960s and 1970s. The forty-seven Phase II interviewees include founders and organizers of disability rights groups and early independent living centers in New York, Boston, Chicago, Texas, and California. Of these, many have also been national leaders in the movement and founders of national organizations. Many in this group, like the Berkeley interviewees, were among those who helped to conceptualize disability rights as a political movement and shaped the programs and philosophy of independent living. Others have been key figures in the development of disability rights law and policy, as organizers, strategists, and lobbyists behind the scenes.

A number of interviewees have held positions in state and federal government agencies and commissions, helping formulate government law and policy on transportation access, social security and health benefits, and personal assistance, education, and rehabilitation services. Several have worked to free disabled people from institutions, and others reflect on their own experiences living in institutions. Some interviewees were deeply involved with the parents’ movement.

The international disability movement is represented by Yoshihiko Kawauchi, a leading proponent of universal design and disability rights in Japan; many American activists interviewed for the project also have connections to the international movement. Two interviewees are pioneering artists with disabilities, who discuss their careers as artists and the relationship of art and advocacy. Several have taught disability studies at colleges and universities, contributing to the concept of disability as a category of analysis analogous in many ways to class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. ix

The project Web site (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/drilm/) includes the full- text of most of the completed oral histories. It offers the researcher four points of access to the collection: by geographic location, by organizational affiliation, by research themes addressed, and by name of interviewees. There is no claim to completeness in the collection; further interviews are planned pending additional funding for the project.

Interview Themes and Topics

An overarching research goal for phases I and II of the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project was to explore and document how a broad group of people with disabilities, in key cities across the country, initiated and built this social movement, and how it evolved nationally, within the context of the social and political fabric of the times. Lines of inquiry include social/economic/political backgrounds of interviewees and family attitudes toward disability; experiences with medical and rehabilitation professionals and with educational systems; identity issues and personal life experiences; involvement in civil rights or other social movements of the era; and developing consciousness of disability as a civil rights issue.

Interviews record how people with disabilities built effective organizations, with information about leadership, organizational structure and style, organizational turning points, stumbling blocks, achievements, and failures. Challenges particular to the disability community are addressed; for example, leaders of independent living centers point out the difficulties of providing much-needed services to clients and answering to government funding agencies for their service mandate, while still maintaining the essential advocacy roots of the independent living movement.

Interviews explore the building of national alliances and coalitions, investigating networking among groups from different locales and among groups accustomed to aligning on the basis of a single disability. Indeed, the issue of inclusiveness within the movement—the nature and meaning, and sometimes tenuousness, of cross-disability alliances and the inclusion of newly recognized disabilities—is a complex and significant theme in many project interviews, and offers an area for future oral history research.

Interviews document the range of efforts—from protest demonstrations, to legislative lobbying, to litigation in state and federal courts—to influence disability law and policy, to embed disability rights into the canon of civil rights, and to alter and expand the very definition of disability. Several interviews also reflect on a recent philosophical shift of some movement thinkers, who draw on a human rights framework and acknowledge the disability community’s need for social supports along with equality of opportunity and civil rights.

Also examined by many narrators are race, gender, and sexual identity issues: the role of women (large) and minorities (limited) in the movement; the development of programs for women and girls with disabilities; questions of sexuality and disability; and the disability movement’s relationship over the years with the women’s, gay and lesbian, and African American civil rights movements. The involvement of able-bodied advocates, x including parents of children with disabilities, is examined by many interviewees, both disabled and able-bodied, with telling accounts of often awkward and sometimes painful struggle over their place in the movement. (For instance, one organization toyed with the idea of granting able- bodied members only three-fifths of a vote.)

Another important theme running through these interviews is the question of equal access. This includes the impact of technological advances—from motorized wheelchairs in the early days of the movement to adaptive computer technologies more recently, all of which have profoundly extended opportunities for people with disabilities. And it includes the campaigns, legislation, and lobbying—on campuses, in communities, and in Congress—for removal of architectural barriers to people with disabilities, for access to public transportation, and for access to personal assistance services, all essential requirements for independent living.

Many interviewees reflect on the process of developing a disability identity and a sense of belonging to a disability community. Several explore the concept of disability culture and its expression in the arts and in media, and theoretical explorations of disability by scholars and educators. Interviewees who have pioneered the fields of disability scholarship, arts, and ethics point out the contributions of disability studies to the broader society in fostering new and more complex ways of thinking about the body, about normality, about crucial ethical issues relating to abortion, euthanasia, and physician- assisted suicide; and in contributing a unique disability perspective to scholarship in history, literature, and cultural studies.

Project Staff and Advisors

Since its inception the project has been collaborative, with staff members and advisors drawn from the disability community, from academia, and from the Bancroft Library and its Regional Oral History Office. The national advisory board for Phase II includes disability rights leaders Fred Fay, from Boston, and Lex Frieden, from Houston; scholars Frederick Collignon and Sue Schweik from UC Berkeley, Paul Longmore, historian from San Francisco State University, and Karen Hirsch, disability scholar from St. Louis.

Ann Lage directed the project for the Regional Oral History Office, providing years of experience in oral history and leadership for the interviewing team. Interviewers for the project had a unique set of qualifications, combining historical perspective, training and experience in oral history methods, personal experience with disability, and, frequently, activism and participation in disability organizations. Oral history interviews were conducted by Sharon Bonney, former director of the Disabled Students’ Program at UC Berkeley and former assistant director of the World Institute on Disability; Mary Lou Breslin, cofounder and former president of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, policy consultant and lecturer on disability civil rights topics, and Henry Betts Award winner; Kathy Cowan, librarian for a public interest law firm; Esther Ehrlich, oral history interviewer and editor in the areas of disability arts and community history (who also took on myriad project management responsibilities); and Denise Sherer Jacobson, writer and educator on disability issues (The Question of David, A Disabled Mother’s xi

Journey through Adoption, Family, and Life, 1999). David Landes, former coordinator of student affairs for the Computer Technologies Program in Berkeley, took a less active role in Phase II when he was appointed to a full-time faculty position in economics. Susan O’Hara, former director of the Disabled Students’ Program at UC Berkeley and the initiator of the original idea for this project, again served as consulting historian, occasional interviewer, and convenor of monthly project meetings.

Conducting interviews in Massachusetts and Washington DC was Fred Pelka, a writer specializing in disability rights politics and history, author of The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement, and a recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship for his proposed book, “An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement.” Harilyn Rousso, educator and consultant on issues of women and girls with disabilities, moved from project interviewee to interviewer, conducting one New York oral history and then organizing and moderating a videotaped group discussion with four New York advocates. The Regional Oral History Office production staff, coordinated by Megan Andres, transcribed interviews and carried out other production tasks.

Bancroft Library project personnel in the Technical Services unit collected, arranged, and catalogued personal papers and organizational records and prepared detailed finding aids. They included Jane Rosario, supervising archivist, and project archivists Susan Storch and Lori Hines, all under the supervision of David DeLorenzo, head of Bancroft Technical Services. The staff of the Berkeley Library’s Digital Publishing Group, headed by Lynne Grigsby-Standfill, prepared the oral histories and other texts, photographs, and finding aids for digital archiving in the Online Archive of California. Brooke Dykman designed the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Web site. Theresa Salazar as curator of the Bancroft Collection, provided curatorial oversight for the project.

Oral History and the Oral History Process

Oral history provides unique and irreplaceable sources for historical study. It preserves the reflections and perspectives of those who have participated in historical events, documenting with firsthand accounts how events happened, how decisions were made, and the behind-the-scenes interplay that underlies the public face of an organization or social movement. Beyond documenting what happened and how, the words of participants reveal the personal and social contexts and the institutional and political constraints which profoundly shape events but may not be apparent in the written record. Most significantly for this project, oral histories offer an opportunity to elicit reflections on often elusive matters of identity, changes in perception and consciousness, and the personal experience of living with a disability. Finally, they provide a record of how people remember and understand their past, often a indication of personal values and cultural meanings.

The DRILM project team, primarily based in Berkeley, all contributed to the original design of the project and assisted in developing interview protocols. Bay Area interviewers were joined by Fred Pelka from Massachusetts for a two-day orientation xii session in December 2000 and by telephone during regular monthly meetings, held to plan and evaluate interviews and review progress. Interviewers assigned to document the movement in a particular location conducted research to choose potential interviewees and interview topics. Once narrators were selected and arrangements made, they prepared a preliminary outline before each interview session, based on interview protocols, background research in relevant papers, consultation with the interviewee's colleagues, and mutual planning with the interviewee. The length of each oral history varied according to the length and complexity of the narrator’s involvement in the movement, but also was dictated by scheduling and availability limitations.

Tapes were transcribed verbatim and lightly edited for accuracy of transcription and clarity. During their review of the transcripts, interviewees were asked to clarify unclear passages and to give additional information when needed, but to preserve the transcript as much as possible as a faithful record of the interview session. The final stage added subject headings, a table of contents, and an index (for the print versions). Shorter transcripts were bound with related interviews into volumes; longer transcripts constitute individual memoirs. Interviewees were offered the opportunity to seal sensitive portions of their transcripts, or omit them from the Internet versions.

There are more than one hundred oral histories in the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement series. Nearly all of them are available via the Internet in the Online Archive of California (http:// www.oac.cdlib.org/texts/); they also can be accessed through the project Web site at http:// bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/drilm/. Print volumes can be read in the Bancroft Library and at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections. They are made available to other libraries and to organizations and individuals for cost of printing and binding. Many of the oral histories are supplemented by a videotaped interview session. Video and audiotapes are available at the Bancroft Library.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through tape- recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. The office is under the direction of Richard Cándida Smith and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The catalogues of the Regional Oral History Office and many oral histories on line can be accessed at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/.

The Bancroft Library's Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project, of which these oral histories are a part, was funded by field-initiated research grants in 1996 and 2000 from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research [NIDRR], Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, U.S. Department of Education. Additional interviews on “Antecedents, Implementation, and Impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act” were completed for the project under a 2006 contract funded by DBTAC-Pacific ADA. Any of the views expressed in the oral history interviews or accompanying materials are not endorsed by the sponsoring agencies. xiii

Thanks are due to other donors to this effort over the years: Dr. Henry Bruyn, June A. Cheit, Claire Louise Englander, Raymond Lifchez, Judith Stronach, the Prytanean Society, and the Sol Waxman and Tina P. Waxman Family Foundation. Special thanks go to Professor Raymond Lifchez for his generous donation in 2006 in honor of Susan O’Hara.

Ann Lage, Project Director Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley August 2007 xiv

Interview History—Sam Dardick

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1933, Sam Dardick contracted polio in 1948 at the age of thirteen. He attended public school in an old-fashioned wooden wheelchair which other students carried up and down stairs to get him to class. He finally got an Everest and Jennings wheelchair and then became an avid wheelchair basketball player. His team played the University of Illinois Gizz Kids many times. He majored in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis.

Between 1958 and 1960, Sam attended the University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student in architecture/city planning. There were no services for students with disabilities, no accessible transportation, no curb-cuts, no academic services. Through his own will power, he walked up flights of steps in his braces and pushed up the hills of the Berkeley campus. Although he celebrated his disability in high school and college and enjoyed being carried around, he changed his mind at UC Berkeley and walked or pushed himself around without the help of others. He developed a “super jock” mentality.

Mr. Dardick, along with his wife, Geeta, was involved in the civil rights movement in St. Louis after graduating from UC Berkeley; although he did not see the cross-over to disability rights at the time. They did not agree with the Vietnam War and U. S. politics, in general, so they packed up their three children, flew to Germany, bought a car and traveled Europe. They arrived in India and lived there about two years while Sam taught at one of the universities.

The Dardick family moved to rural northern California in the early eighties where Sam and Geeta took up farming. Ed Roberts visited the farm one day, chided Sam for being a “super jock” and told him to get involved with the disability rights movement by starting a center for independent living in the area. That was the beginning of the FREED Independent Living Center in Grass Valley. Mr. Dardick and a group of friends established FREED, and he was the first executive director. FREED was required to join the California Foundation of Independent Living Centers (CFILC). Current members were not too welcoming to FREED because they were afraid that the CFILC’s money would be stretched too thin with new members. Eventually, Mr. Dardick became the president of CFILC and guided the Foundation’s efforts to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In retrospect, Mr. Dardick says that he now sees that he “did everything wrong” in his early years as a person with a disability. He has come to embrace the independent living philosophy and the disability rights movement by realizing that the built environment needed changing, not him. He no longer uses his braces but uses a wheelchair, and he no longer allows himself to be carried up curbs or steps. His “super jock” mentality has turned into a “can do” attitude working for the rights and needs of people with disabilities.

Two interviews with Sam Dardick were held, one on May 21, 2007 and one on June 18, 2007. The first interview was conducted in Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, CA where Mr. Dardick had been a patient for almost a year. Geeta Dardick, his wife, and Caleb, his xv

son, were in the room during the interview. Hospital sounds can be heard in the background as well as loudspeaker announcements. Mr. Dardick was able to give about half an hour interview before he became very tired and somewhat confused. The interview was stopped at that time. A second interview was scheduled for the next evening, but Mr. Dardick cancelled the interview.

On June 18, 2007, the interviewer traveled to Mr. Dardick’s home in San Juan Ridge, California, to complete the interview. Mr. Dardick had been released from the hospital and was visibly stronger and happier. The interview lasted nearly an hour. Geeta Dardick was in the room during the interview and she offered clarification in a few instances. After the interview, the Dardick’s invited the interviewer to stay for lunch on the deck overlooking the garden and beautiful pond. Several months later, following transcription and audit/editing of the interview, Mr. Dardick reviewed the transcript, making only minor corrections.

The Dardick oral history was funded as part of a project on the antecedents, implementation, and impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, with support from DBTAC-Pacific ADA Center. It is part of a larger series on the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Project, with major funding provided by two research grants from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, an agency of the US Department of Education. Interview transcripts from this series are available for research in the Bancroft Library and in the UCLA Department of Special Collections. Audiotapes and/or videotapes are available for listening/viewing in the Bancroft Library. Transcripts of most oral histories in this series are on line at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/drilm/.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through recorded memoirs the Bancroft Library’s materials on the history of California and the West. The office is under the direction of Richard Cándida Smith and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, The James D. Hart Director of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The catalogues of the Regional Oral History Office and most of the collection of oral histories can be accessed at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO.

Sharon Bonney

Interviewer

October 2007

Interview with Sam Dardick

Interview 1: May 21, 2007

Begin Audio File 1

01-00:00:00 Bonney: Okay, this is the Sam Dardick interview. It's Monday, May 21, 2007. This is tape one, interview one. Good evening, Sam, nice to meet you.

01-00:00:50 Dardick: Good evening, it's nice to meet you as well.

01-00:00:52 Bonney: Thank you. We're going to sort of explore your history tonight. Could you just start out by telling me where you were born, when you were born, where, who your parents were, do you have brothers and sisters, that sort of thing.

01-00:01:05 Dardick: Okay. I was born in the suburb of St. Louis called University City, and was part of a family which included two brothers and myself, plus my mother and father and grandmother, all of whom lived together. That seemed natural by the way, all the time, to have her with us. She was actually the life of the party, part of a richer experience, having her there. You want blintzes, I’ll make blintzes. She was that type of grandmother who always satisfied my needs.

01-00:01:46 Bonney: What year were you born?

01-00:01:48 Dardick: June 13, 1933.

01-00:01:51 Bonney: What did your dad do?

01-00:01:54 Dardick: My dad operated a store, which was owned by my grandmother, his mother-in-law. He sold fixtures for restaurants, offices and so forth. Later on, as his work became known, he started designing many of the restaurants in St. Louis, hotel restaurants and all kinds of things. He was quite naturally talented, and I used to love going down to his building and his factory, and watching all the carpenters, most of whom came over from Europe.

01-00:02:37 Bonney: Real artisans.

01-00:02:38 Dardick: Right. A lot of them survived what was happening in Nazi Germany and all of Europe. So all in all, I think we were an average family from that era.

01-00:02:58 Bonney: Was your mom a stay-at-home mom?

01-00:03:00 Dardick: Yes. She stayed at home. She wasn’t a great cook, but she took care of the house and family. My grandmother was the cook.

01-00:03:16 Bonney: How old were you when you got polio?

01-00:03:19 Dardick: Thirteen. August of '46, I guess it was.

01-00:03:23 Bonney: Tell me about that experience.

01-00:03:26 Dardick: Well, like many parts of the United States, there seemed to be an [epidemic] bundle, that isn't the word I want, but a large group of people who contracted polio. The results were severe. Many people became paralyzed, and I myself was seriously impacted. Well, I could talk more about the whole, my polio situation. All I can say as an introduction, from the very beginning, my family was very supportive, and took great pains to make me comfortable and happy, and support all the activities that I had and grew up with. My mean older brother actually loved me, and he took care of making sure that his friends and other people tolerated me hanging around with them. Actually though, because of them and so forth, I became somewhat of a jock among my family and friends. I played basketball. I played a St. Louis game which was similar to what they played back east called stickball or cork ball, something like that. I became quite good at it. That was exciting for me because, as a result, I had a lot of friends who were disabled. A great deal of my friends had polio as well.

01-00:05:12 Bonney: Were you in a wheelchair at this time, or what? How did you get around?

01-00:05:16 Dardick: Yeah, of course like anyone else in that era, most people who got polio were slapped into braces and told to walk and get a life. I was no exception. So I went to school in long- legged braces, and I utilized them all the way through college into my marriage. [But at home and during sport activity, I used a wheelchair.

01-00:05:45 Bonney: When you first got polio, how long were you in the hospital?

01-00:05:49 Dardick: Well, they made the St. Louis hospital, which was essentially a free hospital, as a center for all polio treatment. After a couple of years of doing that, they then shifted their business to another part of the St. Louis hospital scene. Here, we all got involved. That was August of, I guess, 1946.

01-00:06:25 Bonney: So nobody else in your family got polio?

01-00:06:29 Dardick: My dad thinks he had polio. He always walked with a dropped foot. Sometimes he felt pain when he was older. So he confided in me one day and said, "Sam, I think you should know. I think I had polio." That was a question he thought maybe he did.

01-00:06:56 Bonney: So how was it going to school? You were probably starting in like freshman year?

01-00:07:02 Dardick: I was, yeah, in ninth grade. I started out there. I mean, for a lot of people, some would want to be in my company. Why, I don't know. But that was what they wanted. They wanted to pull me around the schoolyard, pull me up steps.

01-00:07:24 Bonney: You mean physically, just your body?

01-00:07:29 Dardick: Well, it was the wheelchair, in a wheelchair. They were quite excited about me being there, and that they got a chance to play with me or whatever it was that we did together. I sort of had many different friends, the great majority were non-disabled. I lived with that until I came about thirteen years old. At that age, I met through the Automobile Workers Union a group of veterans who returned from World War II and Korea, which was going on at that time. They wanted to form a team. One of the foremen of the machine shop was willing to take the team over, get equipment, raise money, do the whole thing. Then they invited the young kids, myself and several of my best friends (who remained that way until the recent past). I became quite good at wheelchair basketball, and softball, and whatever we were into, races. Then as Ed Roberts said when I first met him, “You’re nothing but a jock. You don’t work for the right cause.”

01-00:09:02 Bonney: Sounds like Ed. Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, where did you go to college?

01-00:09:11 Dardick: I went to college at Washington University in St. Louis, near my home. Why I didn't go out of town, for a long time I regretted that. But I had a girlfriend, and if I went out of town, I would've lost my girlfriend, and I didn't want to take that chance. So I stayed and went to school in Washington U.

01-00:09:35 Bonney: What did you major in?

01-00:09:38 Dardick: Architecture.

01-00:09:40 Bonney: Okay, and while you were there, what was life like? Did you get help with anything that you needed in terms of disability?

01-00:09:45 Dardick: Well, there's always some measure of interest in me because of my disability. I'm not being negative, but that wasn't the only reason. I suppose I had a personality. But anyway,

I really got a lot of love from my fellow students. So when they went out for sports, they convinced me to go watch the sports and do something. So I did. I got about with the students all the time. I never became a high school jock, but I did hang around with them a lot.

01-00:10:26 Bonney: What about in college? Did you?

01-00:10:29 Dardick: In college I studied architecture. It's very consuming. I mean, it takes almost all your time. Lots of jokes about the charrette. When you get an assignment or design of a building, you stay up. You have a deadline which may be a day, a week, a month or three to four months. But you had to produce. That was really hard. I had a lot of trouble with that, and at one point even wanted to quit. But I guess I developed a philosophy then that, no one really taught it to me, but I decided I wanted to be a winner. If I go and do something, I'm going to go all the way and be successful at it. I sort of lived that idea all the way through. Well, I could keep going.

01-00:11:28 Bonney: Were there other people with disabilities in the school at the time?

01-00:11:34 Dardick: Not many, there was only a young girl who was actually a neighbor of mine. She came down with polio when she was my same age. She wanted to be popular so she joined a sorority. So she turned her back on me at that particular point, which I didn't blame her. I sort of had joined a high school fraternity, surprised I was invited to join, but certainly accepted, and she joined a sorority. So we spent a lot of time apart.

01-00:12:15 Bonney: So you're in college, and you're on the campus, in a push chair, I assume, at that point. So how did you get around? I mean, when you're in architecture, you have a lot to carry.

01-00:12:28 Dardick: Well, I got around in many instances on the backs of my friends. I'd come to school for the first class, which was 8:00 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. Guys would meet me outside, and they'd literally fight to carry me up the steps. I even went to classes on the second floor in addition to the steps just to get in. They loved it. As a result I was able to attend all the key classes, and really enjoy it.

01-00:13:01 Bonney: What did you think about being carried up stairs?

01-00:13:07 Dardick: I actually like to be celebrated. So I didn't mind a bit.

01-00:13:16 Bonney: Did it ever cross your mind that it was dangerous, or that the campus ought to maybe move your classroom down to the first floor at least?

01-00:13:26 Dardick: I had never thought about it. As far as I was concerned, if they wanted me upstairs, they had me. That's what I did through high school. To be honest, that's how I went through college too. The architecture program was up a huge flight of stairs up front, and then three floors inside. I had to be carried in those places as well. By that time, I was wearing braces full time, so it was a little easier. Not lighter, but a little easier to cart me around.

01-00:14:06 Bonney: So let me get this straight, were you in the wheelchair first, and then on braces?

01-00:14:10 Dardick: Yeah, I was in one of those old fashioned wooden wheelchairs, with the big wheels in front, straw, whatever it is, seats, and so forth. So yes, I used that. They'd pull that thing up the stairs. They were crazy.

01-00:14:28 Bonney: That is an old chair to go up stairs. Okay, so then you went into the braces. Did you use crutches too?

01-00:14:35 Dardick: Went through braces, yeah. Then we got the E & J chair. [Everest and Jennings chair]

01-00:14:41 Bonney: When was that? Do you remember what year?

01-00:14:45 Dardick: I would say that was '47, '48, sometime in there. The E & J Chair was great. I could wheel it very fast. Played with veterans who were twice my age. So I really enjoyed that. But I was a kid among adults, and so I never really had much of a starting role, until later.

01-00:15:14 Bonney: So you graduated in architecture then from Washington University. What did you do next?

01-00:15: Dardick: Well, what I did next, besides playing basketball and doing all the sports I could, was decide that I didn't want to be an architect. What I was interested in doing was large scale design. I wanted to become a city planner. So I applied to several different universities, and fortunately, they all liked my credentials. One of them was the University of California [at Berkeley]. So I came to the architecture school here and it was a magnificent campus. There was so much activity. I was happily overwhelmed.

01-00:16:09 Bonney: Were you in Wurster Hall?

01-00:16:12 Dardick: No, a building on the north side of the campus.

01-00:16:18

Bonney: It must be gone.

01-00:16:20 Dardick: It's gone, I'm sure, because they have the new campus over there. It was on the far side on North. What's the name of the street that parallels University Street? Is that North?

01-00:16:31 Bonney: Oh, I know what you mean, Hearst.

01-00:16:33 Dardick: Hearst, that's right. Hearst. So I went to school, and we’d go down to the little theater when we got tired of sitting at our desks, going down and having a beer or coffee. It was really a happy situation.

01-00:16:50 Bonney: Was it easy for you to get up and down the hills and go across campus?

01-00:16:56 Dardick: Yeah. I had no difficulty on the surfaces. I was pretty strong, I built my body up and took care of myself.

01-00:17:10 Bonney: Now I imagine though that you were not carried up stairs, were you, when you were at Cal? Or were you?

01-00:17:18 Dardick: Cal had a huge flight of stairs. No, I went up on my braces. By that time I started becoming disability proud. So I was not going to be carried anymore. So I walked up the stairs.

01-00:17:30 Bonney: What made you disability proud?

01-00:17:33 Dardick: Oh, because I was getting wind, as others, that something is going on. I was changing the status as a person with a disability. So I didn't do anything immediately. I was more interested in the disability, excuse me, the civil rights in its earliest stages. I liked some of the characters. I envied them their position; felt that was really something important to do.

01-00:18:02 Bonney: Who did you admire?

01-00:18:05 Dardick: Well, let's see. I'll start off with my greatest hero at that time, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which I think would be typical among almost any kid in that era. There were some veterans who played basketball with me and taught me and I really thought they were special. None of them were political, other than that might be political for services that would be helpful to the blind, amputees and so forth. So for the first time, we'd seen some disabled going to school, which didn't exist often up until then.

01-00:18:57 Bonney: Did you see these people at Cal? Were there different people with disabilities?

01-00:19:04 Dardick: Yeah, yeah. I read recently that there were no people with disabilities at Cal. There were. There was one friend that always wanted me to go to his church. So one time I did. He was a wheelchair user. I don't know what happened to him.

01-00:19:24 Bonney: Do you remember his name?

01-00:19:26 Dardick: No, I can't remember what his name was. But he, too, was interested in politics. We were much more interested in talking about the civil rights movement, and wasn't involved with what's going on everywhere else but St. Louis.

01-00:19:48 Bonney: Did you actively do things in the civil rights movement? Did you march?

01-00:19:55 Dardick: In the civil rights movement? I went on the big march in Washington, and my wife was very much involved with civil rights with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). It was CORE, wasn't it?

01-00:20:12 Bonney: She's not supposed to talk here. (laughter)

01-00:20:15 Dardick: Yeah. Anyway, she was very involved. So I'd go with her, and I thought it was a very special thing. We then made friends with a lot of black community professionals, because I was an architect, a city planner. I could bring some insights to them in our conversation. My hero among the black civil rights movement was Malcolm X. I overlooked his failings. I thought he was an inspiration, so I took a different tack. Granted, I thought Martin Luther King [Jr.] was special among many of the other people, but I guess I was interested that the only way the civil rights movement could succeed and excel is with people showing all their strengths.

01-00:21:20 Bonney: What did you see going on in Washington when you were demonstrating?

01-00:21:28 Dardick: Well, that was a really heavy day. I went to Washington; (inaudible) we were really going up to meet the secretary of housing. Anyway, I was invited to come up with seven other people, political supporters, and talk about what our needs were. That's as close as I got to politics during that era. But while I was there, my friend, my boss and I, decided to see what was going on, so we walked all over to the Washington Monument, and all of a sudden police came racing in and shooting tear gas. I had no preparation for the tear gas, but it was such a heavy experience. So if that's what you mean by, yeah, I didn't do a lot. St. Louis was far away. There were things that happened, but nothing like the zeal that was followed in Washington in that era.

01-00:22:38 Bonney: Now let's go back to Berkeley. You were here during that period. Did your recognition of the civil rights movement translate for you into civil rights for people with disabilities at that point?

01-00:22:53 Dardick: No, not really.

01-00:22:55 Bonney: Didn't cross over? You're not alone.

01-00:22:57 Dardick: Didn't cross over. I really paid attention to what I was doing career-wise, and also with the black revolution. I always had concern as a child, among some of my friends, black dads, laborers, people who delivered furniture and everything, and I thought they were great. I loved to sit around and talk to them, and it was a good experience for me. So I felt that the civil rights movement was their fight. I didn't put it together that it was my fight.

01-00:23:31 Bonney: Now, when you were in Cal, did you need any kind of services from the campus at all?

01-00:23:38 Dardick: Yes. The only thing that the university had was a housing office that helped. I suppose they might have been helpful in some other ways, but I didn’t need anything. The grants, welfare. There were none of the big programs that came later, which then they could help people get their education.

01-00:24:12 Bonney: Did anybody help you with admissions kinds of things? Did you ever know Barbara Boga? Barbara Boga?

01-00:24:19 Dardick: No. I had great grades. I knew I wouldn't have any difficulty. So that was not on my consciousness at that point.

01-00:24:35 Bonney: What kinds of attitudes did you run into at Cal?

01-00:24:39 Dardick: Well, you know, people welcomed me. I mean, I was safe. I'm white, you know. I guess I can charm people if I have to. No, I did not feel anybody going after me because I was in a chair. Made fun of me, do anything. They left me alone. Now maybe because I had ten tackles around me.

01-00:25:15 Bonney: Yeah, might have something to do with it. How did you physically get around? There weren't any curb cuts here until the sixties.

01-00:25:26 Dardick: Okay, the super jock. The super jock left no barriers locked. If there was a curb, I'd jump it. If I can't make it on my jump, I'd get on the ground, pull the chair up and jump in at that time. If I was going up a flight of stairs, I'd pull the chair up back from behind, you know.

01-00:25:50 Bonney: So you went up stairs yourself at this point, right?

01-00:25:53 Dardick: Yeah, just what happened, why the super jock? Can I jump ahead in the story?

Okay. The first time I met Ed [Roberts], I forgot what year that was, 1970s or 1980s, I think, he was already famous. I happened to hear about him because my wife and I started farming, or dreaming about farming. We were going to build an alternative living set up. I had no money. So somebody said, "Why don't you write Ed Roberts and tell him your dream, and maybe he'll be able to help you, or at least point the way." So I did it. My wife and I wrote a detailed letter to Ed about my dream and what we wanted to do. He never responded. No, I don't think he ever responded.

Anyway, then a friend of mine, poet, went to Washington, and at his hotel was a big meeting of people in wheelchairs. He saw all these people. It was his habit when he was in Washington for meetings, he'd go up to the table where all the hors d'oeuvres were, and he'd make it dinner. So he got to the table, and Ed was there. So he started talking to Ed. He told Ed to get this wonderful guy that Ed really should get hold of because he's really unusual, you've got to get to know him. So he went back, and I think my friend Steve [Sanfeld] said that I'll have Sam call you. I think that's the way it went. So I called him, and he came up to my house, and joined us.

01-00:28:!5 Bonney: Where was your house?

01-00:28:17 Dardick: We lived in a community right up in Northern California called, well, Grass Valley and Nevada City? Okay.

01-00:28:31

Bonney: So Ed went all the way up there.

01-00:28:32 Dardick: He came all the way up there to meet us. We all got into it, including Caleb.

01-00:28:45 Bonney: Who's Caleb? [Sam points] Your son. Okay.

01-00:28:53 Dardick: So we all became friends. We'd see him periodically. As I said, Ed would kid me about the super crip thing. I'm not even sure I heard the term super crip until Ed got on me. He didn't like that, and he thought I was too valuable to waste my time playing basketball, whatever I was doing. He really wanted something else for me. So then he explained

himself, and about his ideas and dreams, and what he had done at CIL [Center for Independent Living] and so forth. He finally asked me, would I like to get involved in what we're doing? I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, why don't you start an independent living center in Grass Valley?” We did.

01-00:30:01 Bonney: Let's hold off on talking about that. There are a couple other things I want to talk about when you're still at Cal. You talk a lot about basketball and being a super jock. Did you ever play against the team from the University of Illinois? Did they ever come around?

01-00:30:17 Dardick: Sure, we beat them lots of times. (laughter) The Gizz Kids.

01-00:30:19 Bonney: You beat them lots of times? Yeah, the Gizz Kids.

01-00:30:22 Dardick: Sure, we played the Gizz Kids. I almost went to the University of Illinois. The coach, I just blocked his name.

01-00:30:33 Bonney: Tim Nugent?

01-00:30:35 Dardick: Tim Nugent, and a really good friend. He was trying to get me there. But, I let my girlfriend talk me out of it and I didn't go. I went to Washington University instead.

01-00:30:48 Bonney: Now see, if you had gone to the University of Illinois, we would have met.

01-00:30:52 Dardick: Okay. But you might have been at our games, wheelchairs.

01-00:30:56

Bonney: No, believe me. No. [laughter] So you did play the Gizz Kids?

01-00:31:03 Dardick: Oh yeah, we had a tremendous competition.

01-00:31:10 Bonney: How do you know Tim Nugent?

01-00:31:13 Dardick: Tim Nugent? By playing basketball. But we liked each other. He's very intellectual, I would say. Also, he's very inspirational. When I told him that I wanted to go to university, he said, “Don't worry, when you're ready, send in your applications, I'll be the first to sign.” So I knew that he would do that. Is he still alive?

01-00:31:39 Bonney: Yes, he is. He lives in Arizona. He's being interviewed.

01-00:31:45 Dardick: Oh good, that's good.

01-00:31:47 Bonney: The other thing I wanted to talk about, is I was reading up on you, and I read something about while you were in architecture school at Cal, you won a summer internship with the city of Berkeley? How did you do that?

01-00:32:01 Dardick: Yeah, was that in the newspaper?

01-00:32:03 Bonney: It was on something on the Internet.

01-00:32:07 Dardick: I don't know what it is that you read. Yes, there was one time that my disability played against me. I applied with several others from my class to be an intern at Berkeley City Hall. I don't remember the name of the planning director, but he was very well known and very well liked. But he decided after I applied, took an exam and all that stuff. He told people the reason why I didn't hire Sam, he was the best candidate, but he can't go up the two flights of stairs at city hall. In other words, you have two flights of stairs. The planning office was upstairs through the city manager.

01-00:33:01 Bonney: No elevator in that building?

01-00:33:05 Dardick: No. They discriminated against me. Now, that hurt because I actually won the position, and I didn't get it.

01-00:33:15 Bonney: Did you fight it?

01-00:33:1 Dardick: I tried. I went to Jack Kent (department chair) and said, “Why?” He said, “It’s really for your own good. We don’t think it was right to force you to walk up three flights of stairs.” I said, “Could you let me decide that?” Anyway, that was a sad story.

01-00:33:38 Bonney: No ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] behind you.

01-00:33:41 Dardick: No ADA or even, nothing then.

01-00:33:44 Bonney: Did that spark your interest in disability rights?

01-00:33:49 Dardick: Yeah, by that time I was beginning to get involved. Remember, up until this, like I said, I guess it was the late sixties, early seventies, the statesmen and women were vets, disabled vets. Disabled vets had different goals and objectives than a scrawny little cripple from St.

Louis. So I didn't even get a chance. I interviewed and was, oh, T.J. [Jack] Kent was the head of the Department of City Planning. The day I came into class after we took the exam and everything, Jack came up, grabbed me around the waist and said, "You've got the job." I said, "Jack, what job?" “Haven't you heard, you were selected for the intern planning position.” Nobody had told me. So I said, "I'm going to find out." So he went, I guess to the city planner director's office and asked why I didn't get the job. They said, "We didn't think it was fair to Sam to force him to through an ordeal." He was protecting me.

01-00:35:10 01-00:39:18 Bonney: When did you leave Cal then?

01-00:36:24 Dardick: I left Cal in that summer, after I finished my internship at Vallejo.

01-00:36:42 Bonney: Was that about 1960 then?

01-00:36:49 Dardick: 1961.

01-00:36:52 Bonney: Okay, what was the internship in Vallejo?

01-00:36:54 Dardick: Project Planner. A little bit of this and that, e.g. zoning, design, General Plan.

01-00:36:56 Bonney: What did you do?

01-00:36:58 Dardick: What did I do? He let me design a little park in Vallejo, and I did that. I did some drafting work, and some other things.

01-00:37:20 Bonney: Okay, so you left Cal —

01-00:37:22 Dardick: I graduated.

01-00:37:23 Bonney: You graduated. Then you went back to St. Louis?

01-00:37:25 Dardick: I went back to St. Louis.

01-00:37:27 Bonney: What was your job there? What did you do when you went back?

01-00:37:32 Dardick: Well, my first job was with the county. Another inaccessible position, millions of stairs, and I actually worked on their General Plan. That was a fun position, and I really got along with [Kahn], the assistant planning director.

After that, okay. I guess that was really it. I worked in Vallejo all summer long and I had a lot of good practice, and I was very pleased. Then I went back to St. Louis. The reason why I went back to St. Louis is one of my classmates and I became really good friends— Federico Garcia Lorca. He was from Chile, and he tried to convince me that I should go and work in Chile, and I actually started working with that goal in mind. Finally I just dropped it, and I met this beautiful, charming young woman, fell in love with her, and ultimately we were married.

01-00:39:08 Bonney: That's your wife Geeta? Is that how it's pronounced, Geeta? Okay, now when you were back in St. Louis, did you work in urban planning, or what was your career?

01-00:39:22 Dardick: Well, the position that I had in Vallejo was really suburban planning.

01-00:39:28 Bonney: No, not in Vallejo, in St. Louis.

01-00:39:30 Dardick: In St. Louis, I worked in urban planning.

01-00:39:32 Bonney: Urban planning, and was that your career path pretty much?

01-00:39:34 Dardick: No. I wanted to get into large scale design.

01-00:39:41 Bonney: So how did you do that?

01-00:39:45 Dardick: Actually, I didn't meet Geeta until I started working in a suburban community called University City. Same feeling. But I did the general plan for an urban renewal project, [inaudible] and did a lot of other things related to development in University City.

Let's see if I can straighten this out. I came back to St. Louis, and had applied for a job with the St. Louis County Planning Department. I got the job. After I finished, I was thinking of going to Chile. I dropped that plan. Then I was hired as the director of planning for urban renewal, field project in a suburb of St. Louis, and I worked with architects, a real team. I was lucky to have a big part in it. We came up with rebuilding the old ghetto that was falling apart.

01-00:41:48 Bonney: Want to stop for a minute then? All right. Somewhere along the line here, when you were in St. Louis, and before you came to California to live, you went on an excursion overseas in your van. At that point you had three children? How old were they?

01-00:42:07 Dardick: Yeah, Caleb was 5. I think it was 5, Josh was 4, and Samantha was probably 2.

01-00:42:23 Bonney: Tell me how, where, how you went over, why you went over there, and what you did.

01-00:42:30 Dardick: Well, I was hating the scene in the United States.

01-00:42:35 Bonney: The political scene you mean?

01-00:42:37 Dardick: The politics, yeah. I guess I can spot other things, conspicuous consumption, the values that were developing, where we have thousands of poor living in our cities, including disabled people, and yet we're doing terrible wars where we lose anyway, and create a monster of life for many more people. I couldn't stand it.

01-00:43:08 Bonney: So this was during the Vietnam era?

01-00:43:11 Dardick: Yeah, sounds repetitious. Sounds like something I should say.

01-00:43:15 Bonney: That's fine.

01-00:43:18 Dardick: So yes. Both Geeta and I were looking for a change of life for different reasons. But it was timing. So one day she read a magazine article in a periodical, I don't remember what they were, Esquire magazine, and she said, "Read this article. Wouldn't you like to do this?" So I read the article, and I told her, "Yeah, let's go." We got busy, got a car, rented it, no bought a car in Germany, and we drove to India.

01-00:43:59 Bonney: So you started in Germany?

01-00:44:04 Dardick: Yeah, started in Germany, spent some time in Spain, down the Grand Canaries, then went through Europe. Then after visiting Greece, we got on a ferry boat and went to Turkey. Then went toYugoslavia and all the communist countries, and then we went back through there. We traveled in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It took us at least a year, maybe longer than a year. We managed to survive, and we didn't lose our sanity.

01-00:45:08 Bonney: You didn't lose your children anywhere along the line. Or your wife. So what did you do in India when you got there?

01-00:45:19 Dardick: Okay, I'll tell you the story. When I was in architecture school, I became friends with the dean. He had invited me to go on the faculty as an associate professor. That sounded intriguing, but I said to him, "George [Anselevicius (?)], I want to go to India." He said,

"You want to go to India? India? I'll fix it.” So he got me a job in a city in India called Ahmedabad, in the school of architecture, in the school of city planning. I taught there about a year and a half or so. That was great fun. Then from there we drove around in India for a while, searching for a guru.

01-00:46:12 Bonney: Searching for what?

01-00:46:13 Dardick: Gurus.

01-00:46:17 Bonney: Gurus. What was access like in India? Could you get around?

01-00:46:20 Dardick: On my braces, yeah. I had a lot of times when I let it get in my way. I've only been to Yosemite one time, and I was with my roommate and another good friend. We had to go up and see the first large site, the waterfall. So we start walking up. Finally, my friend Paul said to me, "Sam, you look like you're white. Why don't you sit down, and we'll go up and scout it out, see how much longer we have to go." I said, "Shoot, yes. Do that." They went and disappeared for about an hour. I was resting. They came back, and I said, "How was it?" They said, “You could never make it, Sam. So we decided to come back and get you and go someplace else.” I would've loved to have gone up there, and think I know I could've made it.

01-00:47:19 Bonney: So you didn't run into much of an access problem in your travels from Germany to India?

01-00:47:28 Dardick: Access? We had the “Yosemite” experience several times on the trip. So I began to crawl to get there.

Bonney: Getting in buildings, touring around?

Dardick: We toured around. It was not the ordinary tour that we did. We literally joined the people who live in their communities, lived like they did. We stayed in a joint family artist community in Ahmedabad which was really nice. Just a lot of rich experiences with another side of India.

01-00:48:05 Bonney: Did you see disabled people? What was their life like?

01-00:48:14 Dardick: Never could figure that out. Still can't. They were cheerful, optimistic a lot of times, they have a much different love of life, but they do have a love for life. It was really a beautiful experience. I liked being in India. I always thought that I'd go back.

01-00:48:47 Bonney: Did the people who were in India who were residents of India, did they have wheelchairs and medical equipment and stuff like that?

01-00:48:58 Dardick: I think they were beginning to. I did see a chair or two, they were designing and going to build one, something on the order of the Quickie, made out of metal, not aircraft aluminum. So it was, I don't know, a lot of them were looking forward to living free.

01-00:49:28 Bonney: About what year was this?

01-00:49:30 Dardick: When we were there? We were there from '71, no, '69 we left, and we came back '73.

01-00:49:43 Bonney: So you were gone almost four years.

01-00:49:45 Dardick: Three or four years. I'm pretty sure we left—

01-00:49:50 Bonney: Now when you came back to California, did you go directly to Nevada City, Grass Valley?

01-00:49:54 Dardick: No.

01-00:49:56 Bonney: Where did you go?

01-00:49:59 Dardick: We went to St. Louis, and we stayed there with Geeta's parents for a while, and then we really had no idea where we were going to go. But we did get our car fixed, and set out for somewhere. Then we decided that we enjoyed meeting a group of people at Sai Baba’s. He's one of the Indian gurus. We heard that there was a scene there.

01-00:50:35 Bonney: Where was that?

01-00:50:37 Dardick: Ben Goula, Putaparti, through the parts, through some of India. So we drove there, and had a whole new experience at that point. Came here, not studied but attracted to the Indian lifestyle and religious relationships.

01-00:51:07 Bonney: Did you adopt their lifestyle and their religious beliefs?

01-00:51:12 Dardick: We adopted pieces, but never decided to become Hindus.

01-00:51:23 Bonney: What attracted you?

01-00:51:30 Dardick: What attracted us is there's a color to India. It's just really beautiful. Poor, well it isn't poor. A friend of ours spent the last couple of days there. It's changing into a very modern

country now. The people were charming. I had students who were amazing. I lived in a joint family compound, which essentially is a workshop and housing. The owner and the others are mostly artisans, plus his family and friends. The artisans work antiqued, whatever the word is, carvings and things like that. So they were making money off of allowing my friend to practice his art.

01-00:52:36 Bonney: Okay, why don't we stop there.

Interview 2: June 18, 2007

Begin Audio File 2

02-00:00:00 Bonney: This is interview two with Sam Dardick. It's June 18, 2007. We are in Sam's home. Nice to see you out of the hospital.

02-00:00:14 Dardick: Thank you, and welcome to our surroundings here, quite powerful, and we're really happy to be back. Actually, my wife and I have been gone from here for close to a year, and so this really means something.

02-00:0:32 Bonney: It's beautiful here.

02-00:00:35 Dardick: Thank you.

02-00:00:36 Bonney: Last time we talked, we were about to start talking about your founding of FREED (Foundation of Resources for Education and Employment of the Disabled; now called FREED Center for Independent Living), the independent living center up here in Northern California, in this area.

02-00:00:45 Dardick: Well, I want to correct one impression. Although I was the lead on the incorporation of FREED, and its functioning here, there were several other people who were involved too. Leaders who are blind, profoundly deaf, and they, too, were involved to try to make this as wide open a disability program as possible. So my wife was very much involved as a disability writer. She had a lot of insights over the years too, so they were incorporated in to what we did.

02-00:01:30 Bonney: Well, how did it start?

02-00:01:34 Dardick: How did it start? Well, to go back one step, Ed really influenced me, Ed Roberts. We saw him every once in a while when we were down in the Sacramento area, and that was minimal, in terms of what eventually happened. It's a funny story about how Ed

influenced us. We have a friend, a writer, a poet, a storyteller, who lives up here, and his name is Steve Sanfeld. Steve would go to Washington every once in a while for a reading or something like that. But he always liked to feed himself by going into one of the big conferences that were being held, and going up to the snack table, and taking some of the snacks that came along. Or if there was wine served, he made sure he got his glass of wine. Well, while he was doing this, he saw a very interesting person in a wheelchair. He was surrounded by other people who were admiring him. So Steve went up and talked to him, met him and so forth. One of the first things, of course, he did was to say, "Have you met Sam and Geeta? Have you met them? They really should do something like this." Ed said, "Sure, I'd love to meet Sam and Geeta, heard about them from other people, sure." So when Steve got back here, he asked me to call Ed to arrange for a time to come up here. We were living in the cabin. It was pretty raw still, in a raw state. Ed came. The first thing he did was come across that bridge, into the entrance. He kept complaining, if I remember correctly, about how treacherous this was. But it didn't seem to bother him.

02-00:03:54 Bonney: I know the feeling. (laughter)

02-00:03:57 Dardick: Yeah. He came into the house eventually, and we took the ramp down, and we spent a glorious day together, and then started talking about why an independent living center in Grass Valley, serving this area. The main thing is that he urged upon me to go ahead, incorporate, and he would get the full support from his ILC (Independent Living Center), of course, Berkeley, and also to get CFILC (California Foundation of Independent Living Centers), which is our mother organization that works with all of us. So that's what I did. That's what got the people and me involved in making these decisions. Initially, it was me and Geeta. Later on, we found other people to join us, and we had no difficulty in finding a board of directors, and almost all of them, were people with disabilities. Then we put together a proposal for, well, we did a lot of things. We incorporated and got the 501(c)(3). We then got the papers from the state, and involved the state with some of the bureaucrats from that agency. They furnished us all the paperwork which we needed for putting together a legal non-profit.

02-00:05:59 Bonney: How were you funded the first time around?

02-00:06:02 Dardick: Well, we were really working hard, and we joined a group called the Commission, no, no. What was the name of it? It was an organization that connected people with disabilities who had theoretically was to advise the board of supervisors.

02-00:06:27 Bonney: Oh, in the county.

02-00:06:30 Dardick: Yeah, that's right. We got a grant from them, some money from them to open an office and do some of this work. Then we got another grant. I'm trying to think of the name of that organization.

02-00:06:47 Bonney: CAN? (Community Access Network) CAN?

F1: You actually got the Tide Lands Oil Money from the Republicans.

02-00:06:54 Dardick: No, that came later. The initial one that was really a surprise. No, the initial one.

02-00:07:02 Bonney: From the county.

02-00:07:04 Dardick: It was the county, and they took money from something that came through — can't remember for the life of me. But we got it.

02-00:07:11 Bonney: That's the important part.

02-00:07:13 Dardick: Was a couple thousand dollars. But it was enough for us to really get started. One anecdote which I thought was very funny all around, but wasn't funny at the time. Our office was in the home of Tom Solinsky, who was one of our first members, first president of the non-profit. Tom lent us this room which also happened to be his son's bedroom. We'd work in there, you know. When it came time to put together the state proposal, which was yea thick, [gestures] a woman who became my first, our first director of services, she helped me put it together. It was just the two of us. It fell apart just as we were trying to mail it off. I don't remember how this accident happened. Sheets were all over the floor and everything. We were all dying because we were afraid we'd never meet our deadline of getting it to DR (Department of Rehabilitation) that day. So we had a lot of strange things happen. We made it.

02-00:08:42 Bonney: Good. What were the first issues you focused on as a group?

02-00:08:46 Dardick: Mostly related to the things that we were already doing, working with people with disabilities. Most of the people we first worked with were people with physical disabilities. We then had the full array of service provisions, including housing, personal advocacy, but they all had different names which subsequently we changed some of them. Attendant care, which is now personal services. Let's see if I'm missing anything. Well, the five core services of the Department of Rehabilitation. We were providing those as services. But then we helped a lot of people with information referral, as it was, the program was called. A lot of people didn't know where to go. We did that. I even did a lot of that myself. Volunteers came in, and so a big part of this for everybody, including the consumer, was the ability to learn what we were doing. We found that each of the individuals brought a certain amount of their own knowledge, and it was just a grassroots effort, and it worked. It really worked quickly.

Meanwhile, people like Geeta were writing articles for the newspaper. People all of a sudden heard about us. So we grew rapidly. I think our first year we had 500 consumers

that we had involved in our statistics, and we were really quite good. Over the years, FREED has expanded that. It now serves a much larger area than just Nevada County. But at first, it was just Nevada County, and particularly Eastern County, or the Western County, in that direction, which eventually is Nevada City, Grass Valley, and maybe the San Juan Ridge or a few other places. But down here. We tried to make outreach to the eastern county, which was Truckee, and that took a long time to develop. I'm not sure I've ever successfully developed it or not. Many people with physical disabilities are up there, and all those who are up there, generally the jocks, skiers and so forth. They just weren't interested.

02-00:11:48 Bonney: Now, were you the director of FREED at one point?

02-00:11:54 Dardick: I was the first. First, I was asked to be the President of the Board. I thought that was a bad idea. I thought Tom would be a, should do it.

2-00:12:05

Bonney: Tom who?

02-00:12:06 Dardick: Solinsky. He became the first, I think the first real president. They wanted me to be the executive director, so I was the executive director. Then we had a board of seven, ten, no, nine people. As I said, it was really a cross section. A couple of people with visual impairment, including someone who was officially blind. We had a profoundly deaf person, another person who had difficulty hearing. We had several people using wheelchairs, including power chairs, like what I'm in. So from the very beginning, we were into the spirit of all disabilities.

First problems we really had that were controversial is, a member of the board who was profoundly deaf wanted to make the program accessible to the deaf. He felt that he had to be there and that we had to have full-time signers, and we tried our damnedest to get a person to work on staff. We finally did. Actually a woman from up here on San Juan Ridge, and she worked as our first person with that. But she couldn't get others involved. We just couldn't get others involved. Finally, we set up a committee, and then we got a few people involved. Then it was excellent. But soon, we gave up, finally. It just didn’t work. Just not enough people who were deaf living in rural communities. We learned a lot. We learned a lot about people who were deaf. I did, looking in their surroundings and in their community. That made sense to us, but as it turned out, most of them moved to Southern California, where the services were already there. So that was one program.

Personal care assistance, we called it attendant care. We started getting people involved with that very quickly, towards one of the biggest programs. It was never controversial, that I can remember. It just went over, it's neat, and still is. Even with public authority here now, it certainly serves a heck of a lot of people.

Then housing, that's controversial for everybody, not just for people with disabilities. Quite frankly, we haven't solved any of the needs. There are big needs. People just fend for themselves. We do have a fix-it program that developed while I was still director, and that is taking, aligned with the telephone pioneers and others, we'll go into people's houses and build ramps, and that's a great program, non-controversial. I don't think that anything was controversial in a negative way. We managed always to have good press. Even the early reporters would seek us out for stories constantly. So that's how we built up our reputation, and a lot of people really liked what we were doing.

02-00:16:16 Bonney: I wanted to ask about the housing issue. I mean, you're so hilly here, and you know, you need steps to get in places and out and that sort of thing, I imagine that that was one of the big problems you faced with housing, was trying to find accessible housing?

02-00:16:36 Dardick: No, I think the problem that emerged out of that was the cost of rentals and so forth. We did have a few in Grass Valley, in a flat area, but outside of that, we could not find much housing in the county. Whatever was available, we got honed on it as quickly as possible. I think it's doing a lot better now, and particularly with the fix-it problem, more people are interested in using their houses for housing and people with disabilities.

02-00:17:16 Bonney: Why was FREED needed here?

02-00:17:19 Dardick: I think FREED was needed, of course, for the services that they were really badly needing. But I think what it really did was bring to the attention of the public what were the needs and deficiencies within this county. Some of the problems were advocacy related to curb cuts. We have curb cuts in Grass Valley and Nevada City, take it for granted now. Well, we still have problems with that. Parking places, not very accessible. Access to public domains, restaurants, theaters, and the whole gamut, we were really, most of them were unable to be used. I could not get around in those days without being on braces and using walkers.

02-00:18:23 Bonney: We're talking 1985, about right, that you started FREED, so that wasn't all that long ago.

02-00:18:29 Dardick: It wasn't all that long ago. We've made great strides. Again, the newspaper articles put pressure on people to, not by name, but by, it was quite easy to say in those days that there's no way we can get up to the second floor of the theater. In fact, if I ever wanted to see a first run movie in Grass Valley, that was on the second floor. I'd have to crawl up the steps and crawl into the seat.

02-00:19:02 Bonney: Did you do that?

02-00:19:05 Dardick: Of course. Remember, I was a jock. So I thought I was grand to get around and do everything.

02-00:19:14 Bonney: Tell us the story about using the restroom in Posh Nosh. I love that name. (laughter)

02-00:19:23 Dardick: Yeah, really that's Geeta's story.

02-00:19:25 Bonney: Well, it was your guts.

02-00:19:29 Dardick: In fact, we sat inside. I don't think I even know how that work? Can't talk right now.

02-00:19:38 Bonney: Yeah, I think you were having lunch.

02-00:19:40 Dardick: We were having lunch, but I forgot. Yeah, I've forgotten the story.

02-00:19:49 Bonney: Having lunch, and you needed to use the restroom.

02-00:19:53 Dardick: Okay, now it's back to me, the same thing. I had lunch with friends and Geeta, and I think we were discussing some of the things that FREED was doing, it was early. I had to go to the bathroom. So I knew that the bathroom, it was my first time at Posh Nosh, too. But I knew they had a bathroom, they had to have a bathroom. So I asked the waiter, and he pointed over to the end of the room, and I said, “Okay, thank you.” I said, “Could I use my wheelchair to get into it?” and he admitted quite honestly, no. So with that, I hopped on the floor and pulled myself across the room, between all the other people who were dining at their tables and so forth, making a tremendous scene out of it, and then get inside and be able to use the toilet. Yeah, we did things like that, lots of it. We called, did everything we could to call our attention to the problems of people with disabilities. As a result,Tom Solinsky worked on this one, and we had a restaurant in Nevada City, built a ramp into it, a concrete pad into it and a ramp to the bathroom, they made it accessible.

02-00:21:27 Bonney: What about Posh Nosh? Is it accessible now?

02-00:21:30 Dardick: No. [laughter] I haven't been there —

02-00:21:35 Bonney: Sam, you need to go in there and have lunch again.

02-00:21:39 Dardick: Yeah. Nevada City is a problem. I could go into details about how much of a problem it is, but it's a problem.

02-00:21:45 Bonney: Because of its age.

02-00:21:49 Dardick: Because of its age, because of the terrain and so forth. We have a good one. We had a restaurant on a side street that was quite popular, particularly among my friends from the Ridge. Every time they wanted a meeting, they wanted to meet up there. Well, they have a step which is about two feet to get in. Well, a foot and a half maybe, a step, and I would not let them take me in that way by pulling me up the step. By this time, I was an ardent foe of inaccessibility. So I said, “No, you're not going to pull me in to meet those people.” The cook, who was a friend of mine, came out on the street. He said, "Sam, you have people waiting for you. Let me take you in, you know I can carry you." No, I wouldn't let him do it. So, as I remember, I didn't go. I got others not to meet there too, but it took a long while.

02-00:23:18 Bonney: Let's switch gears and talk about the California Foundation of Independent Living Centers. You were involved with that.

02-00:23:28 Dardick: Very much involved. It's an organization, like most organizations, which is made up of all the members of independent living centers. Their function is to find grants or money for all the independent living centers, to share in the technology and the understanding of all the things. We had no staff. It was all at that time run by the directors themselves. It was having a lot of difficulty. When we came in, one of the requirements was that we in FREED join CFILC. Well, there were two of us which were coming in. One of them was, you'll have to forgive my memory, because I lose it at times. But it's City of, oh God, what city, Santa —

F1: Santa Cruz?

02-00:24:40 Dardick: Santa Cruz.

02-00:24:44 Bonney: Oh, the ILC in Santa Cruz.

02-00:24:48 Dardick: Okay, and us. We were drawing attention of legislators, and that's another fun thing to do, statewide advocacy, or even a federal advocacy eventually. There was limited money. There wasn't as much money as we have now in the independent living movement. So, we needed to become a member. Well, to tell you the truth, and I won't name names, but it surprised me as what a lot of the directors who were against us incorporating, and becoming an ILC. I didn't give a dime. Tom and Geeta and me, we went down to the state, and we started advocating for state money, not cooperating with the independent living centers. We had of all people, John Doolittle, and Wally Herger, who were our representatives up there. They were both very, very conservative legislators. Herger, at that time, was in the Assembly. Doolittle at that time was in the State Senate. But they helped us. They helped us get funded.There was a grant that was being returned to the state, or not being utilized, and probably the state was going to lose it. So without us even knowing about it, Herker introduced a bill for us to take that money and use it for us, and for Santa Cruz. So that's where we got our first funding, plus the little bit of money we got

from organizations up here. We started raising money seriously, and got better at it, but that's what got us over the hump. At the same time, by doing that, we became a respected member of CFILC.

02-00:27:03 Bonney: Now why didn't CFILC want you?

02-00:27:07 Dardick: I think they were afraid of dividing, that the pot was getting too thin. In other words, the CFILC state funding proposal was the same year that we came in. I can't give you the numbers, but it was low. It was divided up, and it was divided up based upon population, I forget all the criteria, many of whom we couldn't meet, and others couldn't meet it. So we had to make a lot of changes, just in order to get that, and we had to change the legislation to help our ILC in getting some of that. So it wasn't that whoever ran Berkeley's CIL, whether they were jealous of us, they weren't jealous of us. They were afraid though that we would hurt their program.

02-00:28:20 Bonney: Spread the money too thin.

02-00:28:22 Dardick: That's right.

02-00:28:24 Bonney: What was your role in CFILC?

02-00:28:29 Dardick: Well, the people, for some reason, started to focus on me. I was outspoken at our meetings. I made a lot of recommendations quickly about what things should be done. I helped a lot on the advocacy thing. Quite a bit of schmoozing helped me in relationship to the other directors. After my first year there, they elected me President of CFILC, and our lobbying group called CCILC [California Coalition of Independent Living Centers]. I was re-elected every year for about six years.

02-00:29:29 Bonney: You're a sucker. [laughter]

02-00:29:32 Dardick: Well, I did a lot of good things for the organization.

02-00:29:35 Bonney: What did you do? Tell me about this?

02-00:29:37 Dardick: We brought in a lot of other grants. We were very successful in our advocacy on bills of all kinds that came out at that time, during the early days. Then, eventually, we got involved with ADA and its passage. I was responsible for getting the independent living centers (ILCs) on board for the same activity. Then all of us would pitch in and were on the same programs to build money for advocacy, and also for traveling to Washington and wherever it was necessary to go for lobbying these people. I don't want to short-sight some of the other things, but we got a lot of educational materials made, put together to

help people understand what an ILC is, and also what kinds of needs are there for people in the disability community, who wanted to live independently. So we did a lot of things that were really very successful. Up until then, minimal, particularly outside of the reach of state. They were focused on state advocacy, legislative change.

02-00:31:11 Bonney: What did you do towards the ADA?

02-00:31:14 Dardick: Get people from the ILCs as resources to canvassing. Going in and training them for work in their communities so that we can get a maximum number of votes. California came out with an outstanding record on ADA support in its passage. I like to say that as chairman of CFILC and directly involved in the advocacy, I'm very proud of that.

02-00:31:47 Bonney: Did you organize letter writing campaigns?

02-00:31:52 Dardick: Yeah, the whole bit.

02-00:31:54d Bonney: Because I know DREDF (Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund) was, CIL and DREDF were working on that.

02-00:31:58 Dardick: Oh, all of us were working on that. CFILC played a vital role in doing that too.

02-00:32:04 Bonney: What about Justin Dart's hearings in Berkeley?

02-00:32:08 Dardick: Several of us, including myself, went down to Oakland and participated in a hearing.

02-00:32:17 Bonney: What did you think of Justin?

02-00:32:20 Dardick: I liked Justin a lot, and got the chance to be with him on a couple of occasions. Up until the time of his death, we'd get a card every Christmas from him and his wife.

02-00:32:35 Bonney: What kind of guy was he?

02-00:32:37 Dardick: Down to earth and accessible. Those were the main things that I needed from Justin, and he was there. I think, well, we went to some of the first big advocacy things in San Francisco just for people with disabilities. This was about, I can't remember the year, '90, 1990? I don't know. Look at Geeta, she could remember, because we all went down there, and it was against the cable cars, they weren't accessible. So I don't remember what year that was.

02-00:33:25 Bonney: Maybe '87. The APTA (American Public Transit Association) demonstrations.

02-00:33:28 Dardick: Okay, so we were in all those demonstrations. We were also involved in behind the scenes. We would go into wherever they met, and listened to Justin getting others talking. It was really exciting for me, this time, that I saw all the big names in disability politics, and how I was awestruck, they were so good. Justin, of course, was a shining light. He was a marvelous master of integrating people. I mean, he had the people who were really down to earth, sixties advocacy. He wanted to get on the street and lie down, to do something for the physical right of way, and Justin, along with I guess DREDF and the others, was DREDF in existence then?Yeah, I guess it was. Yeah, it was good. But so were some of the other leaders. I mean Judy Heumann. I just saw Judy by the way. She's in town. She looks great. Anyway, she was, I thought, really vital, and watching her in action was really fun. All of them, Marilyn Golden. Marilyn Golden came up here during that period and camped out by the garden out there. We had a lot of fun.

02-00:35:10 Bonney: Did you actually march in the demonstration against the public transit?

02-00:35:13 Dardick: Yeah, yeah.

02-00:35:14 Bonney: Tell me about that.

02-00:35:17 Dardick: Well, it was really very well organized. We were all trained as to how to talk, what do say, how to be a unit, and we behaved accordingly. We would just sit down, I guess we all sat down, or if we were supposed to march by the hotel, the hotel was the —

02-00:35:48 Bonney: I think it was the Hyatt.

F1: Hilton.

02-00:35:52 Bonney: Was it the Hilton? Did you allow yourself to get arrested that day?

02-00:35:58 Dardick: Yeah, yeah. I got arrested as President of CFILC.

F1: Yeah, different one. We had a big protest in Sacramento, and they were going to eliminate the funds for the ILCs, and that's when he got arrested.

02-00:36:17 Dardick: Yeah, down there I didn't get arrested.

02-00:39:19 Bonney: Because I was in that march, too, in San Francisco, and when they announced that they were going to start arresting people, we left, like little chickens. [laughter]

02-00:36:30 Dardick: They did touch us. I don't think we left though. I think the two of us are so die hard sixties liberals that we never really marched in those days. Not that we didn't, but not heavily, not at the big ones in Oakland or San Francisco or the Bay Area. So we had our fun, working for the transit. The focus was principally on the cable cars.

02-00:37:01 Bonney: Tell me how you got to Washington, DC for the signing of the ADA.

02-00:37:08 Dardick: We flew.

02-00:37:09 Bonney: But who invited you? I mean, how did you —

02-00:37:11 Dardick: Oh, I think Justin invited us. I think we got a letter from him, yeah. Right away, we got something.

02-00:37:21 Bonney: How was that?

02-00:37:24 Dardick: Being in Washington, and sitting inside, it was beautiful, it was exciting. We mingled with, not the President [President George W. Bush], but the President's father [President George H. W. Bush], and all the different, Kennedy. It was like, here you are, all of a sudden, invited to the seat of the power of this country and for me, I never experienced anything so magnificent as that. Then I could actually be a part of why we were there. It felt really good, very good. Then going afterwards around and talking to people, it was a brilliant opportunity. You did that too. Oh, you weren't up at ADA signing? Oh.

02-00:38:19 Bonney: Those are all the questions that I have for you. Is there anything else that you want to say before we close?

02-00:38:28 Dardick: Well, probably. Let me gather myself for a bit.

F1: Well, I have a question you could ask him. It's like after you were disabled when you were thirteen, you're now seventy-four, you've been an activist, essentially, from the very beginning, a very positive person about disabilities, what do you say about your of lifetime as a person with a disability and a disability, a proud person with a disability?

02-00:39:05 Dardick: Well, it's funny. I wonder if you experienced it too. I don't ever think of myself as being a disabled person. I'm a person, and I think the disability movement has really earned a lot. But one thing is that it hasn't convinced a lot of the consumers yet as to what their roles really are. They're consumers, they really are people who can do whatever they want to do in our society today given a little effort. I began as a, well, as a kid with polio, I was carted around. You know, I played wheelchair basketball, and I was carted around for all

kinds of things, schooling and so forth. I did everything wrong, probably, for the disability rights movement.

02-00:40:12 Bonney: But there really wasn't one at that time. Yeah, we didn't think anything about it.

02-00:40:18 Dardick: There wasn't one. So I never thought anything about it. It really wasn't until we, I mean, we knew a little bit about the movement, but here we are, on our land, planting corn, or whatever we were doing, and we heard that something was happening out there. We even heard when Ed became the Director of the Department of Rehabilitation. I sent him a letter, asking why they turned me down for a grant. [laughter] Anyway, never got a reply from him. But so, it wasn't until, exactly when, I would say, right before the early seventies, no, late seventies, late seventies, that I decided to take a role. I think the principal reason was because Ed told me too.

02-00:41:36 Bonney: I was going to ask you, Tony Sauer was just appointed as the state director of rehab, and he was now the executive director of FREED, right?

02-00:41:48 Dardick: He was following me as my successor.

02-00:41:50 Bonney: What do you think of Tony as state director?

02-00:41:52 Dardick: Well, I'm going to pat myself on the back. I've been his mentor ever since he's gotten involved with this. He was a little farm boy. Not a farm boy, a little logger boy. Dad was a logger, his brothers were both loggers. He got paralyzed in a motocross accident back in the early seventies, and we became friends. It's a long story as to how we became friends. He and I made an effort, and it wasn't associated to the disability movement. We had an effort, we saw some guys using wheelchairs, and we went up and introduced ourselves to each one of them during the course of the day, and we built a basketball team. We started playing basketball, and we started playing other teams and Tony, we all became very close. But I became really close to Tony, and I thought that he was wasting his time making benches or tables or what have you, which he did. He was a good carpenter, finish carpenter. But I said, “Don't you want to do something”? I kept riding him, “You know, there's some other things you can do with the disability movement is wide open. You probably could get a job.” “All right,” I said, after a while, “you could come to FREED as my deputy director.” So finally, I guess I offered him a salary, and it was agreeable to him, and so he joined FREED. He was there, still signing up for service providers, and ultimately I moved him into the director of services, and then to my deputy director.

02-00:44:08 Bonney: I have one other question. Tell me when you're ready to start again.

02-00:44:20

Dardick: Anyway, Tony. I think he's been a magical search, a flight, now that we've got him at DR and he sure is good at what he does. Have you met him?

02-00:44:40 Bonney: No, I have not. Well, I don't, I'm not sure. I may have, I suppose.

02-00:44:46 Dardick: Very handsome young man, and anyway, that's what happened, carpenter to director.

02-00:45:00 Bonney: You were also a farmer. I mean, that is what you were doing, farming from your wheelchair. How did you do that?

02-00:45:07 Dardick: With a shovel. [laughter] A spade, and so forth. I'd get on the ground. It was really a hands-on, body-on effort that I took. It was like crawling into the bathroom, except that this was for something good. I love farming. I never did it before. I mean, I might have helped my grandmother and my mother hold plants while they were planting them, but really, never anything like this. We just went ahead and built a farmstead. We did everything. We had chickens, and we had ducks, and we had a pony, and we've just really taken advantage of this particular place we have. I don't know if you'll have time to see the orchards and all the things that we built. Because of my illness, haven't gotten it up to par yet. But Geeta's got the garden planted and that feels good. I know we're having someone thin those apples. Put it this way, we have apples. Quite a set.

02-00:46:34 Bonney: I heard that you developed some kind of a little ramp system where the animals would walk up the ramp and stand there while you milked them?

02-00:46:43 Dardick: Yeah, we did that with a goat, for goats. It was a stanchion, yeah, a stanchion. It's a common device for milking a goat. It keeps their head so they can eat, but from being mischievous, which they all are. [laughter] So I built one, myself, with a feeder box up high so they can put their head through a hole and eat, and then, and they're up high, so I can milk them from my wheelchair, and I loved it. We raised goats, and made goat cheese and all kinds of things for several years. Then I got involved in independent living centers, and Geeta got involved in writing, freelancing, and these other things. So that was the goat. I'm trying to remember. Oh, if the goat got loose, it immediately set for your fruit trees and damaged them, so we really had to be careful. So I controlled my animals with a voice. I screamed at them their command, and they followed it. It didn't take long. So if I said, told the goats, "Milk time, go to the stanchion," they'd go, put their head through the loop, wait for their food. So we really had a wonderful time. We even had babies that we raised. So we really got into the farming scene. I had to invent, invent a lot of different things in order to do some of the things that I needed, that we have here. Most of which have been destroyed since I no longer have the time.

02-00:49:08 Bonney: So what's next?

02-00:49:11 Dardick: Well, get my health back first. That's really daunting. But I'm doing it. I am gaining weight, or at least getting healthy. Actually, I've lost weight, but I'm getting my health back. Then I'm learning how to sit in a chair, because I was pretty bad so I’m learning how to sit in a chair again, and use the distribution of my weight to really help with sitting that I hadn’t done. What else? I'm starting to do a transfer, and that kind of thing. So I'm apparently doing really well.

02-00:50:14 Bonney: Were you in a wheelchair before you got sick, or were you on — did you walk?

02-00:50:19 Dardick: No, started back in '75, we started the farming and everything. I wore braces.

02-00:50:32 Bonney: You've mentioned braces, yeah.

02-00:50:33 Dardick: That was really difficult, because you'd get up, down, up, down, and you're doing all kinds of moving, and I can't wear braces and do this. It's crazy. I mean, I had long-legged braces all the way up to here on both legs. (gestures) So I finally decided to discard them. I don't know whatever happened to them. I guess we threw them away.

At the same time, I became aware of what was happening in accessibility. I realized that that's one of the reasons that I got so interested. I no longer could get, I used to go up steps, huge flights of stairs, like at the library at one point. Anyway, I couldn't do it anymore in a wheelchair. So I started a thought, and Geeta, my wife, thought we'll have to fight to get something done so you can go to the places in this town. We did. We changed a lot of them. I mean, there's definitely been a change in mentality, in everything. Just in the conversation the other night, a group of us were there, I think Tony was there too, and we were talking about, we were sliding backwards. Some of the things that we had gained we're now losing because no one's taking any interest in this any more. There are a couple of guys who quickly told me that there were a lot of places getting accessible. So there's sort of a give and take there. But yeah, it's an ongoing job that I always will be involved in, as far as employment is concerned, well, talk to Tony. [laughter]

02-00:52:52 Bonney: On that note, let me thank you for letting us come and interview you, and I really enjoyed it.

02-00:53:00 Dardick: Thank you.