A Child’s-Eye Memoir of the Hippie Trail: Caleb Dardick in Conversation with Former California Department of Rehabilitation Director Tony Sauer
Join author Caleb Dardick for a vivid reading and conversation celebrating his forthcoming memoir, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail (Running Wild Press, September 21, 2026). Caleb will be in conversation with Tony Sauer, former Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, longtime disability leader, and close family friend.
The Adventures of Superfreak offers a child’s-eye view of the counterculture — not as nostalgia, but as lived family reality, with all its longing, idealism, danger, and contradiction. In 1970, Caleb’s family set out from Amsterdam to India in a VW bus: three young children traveling with disabled parents — his father using a wheelchair, his mother living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder — on a 20,000-mile journey through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Along the way: psychedelics, free love, tense border crossings, spiritual seekers, and a childhood shaped as much by wonder as by instability.
Told through the eyes of the child he was, the memoir explores attachment and abandonment, disability and independence, family resilience, spiritual seeking, and the costs of adult freedom. To make sense of the upheaval around him, Caleb becomes “Superfreak,” a self-invented superhero trying to understand love, danger, and belonging inside an extraordinary family journey.
This Sacramento event offers a rare conversation between an author and a statewide disability leader whose life and work later intersected closely with the family at the heart of the book. Tony Sauer played wheelchair basketball and tennis with Caleb’s father, Sam Dardick, and later succeeded Sam as Executive Director of FREED Center for Independent Living, when Sam was elected to the Nevada County Board of Supervisors.
Although the memoir takes place before the Dardick family’s later involvement in the independent-living and disability-rights movements, Caleb and Tony will explore how the experiences in the book foreshadow questions that would later shape Sam’s public work: access, interdependence, independence, family support, and the meaning of freedom. Tony’s former role as Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation gives the conversation a strong Sacramento connection, linking the book’s intimate family story to California’s broader disability-rights and independent-living history.
Tony also brings a personal connection to the memoir. After reading an advance copy, he wrote to Caleb that the book left him “with tears in my eyes,” calling it a vivid and moving story of a journey that was “uniquely Dardick.”
Caleb’s professional life has spanned public service, nonprofit leadership, environmental advocacy, disability-related community work, and local government. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, he is also a storyteller and leadership coach. He lives in Nevada City, California, with his wife.
Tony Sauer is the former Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, the Sacramento-based state agency serving Californians with disabilities. He was first appointed Deputy Director by Governor Gray Davis, later promoted to Director by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and reappointed by Governor Jerry Brown. Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Director of FREED, Center for Independent Living, succeeding Caleb’s father, Sam Dardick. A lifelong Nevada County resident, Sauer is now retired and remains a respected voice in California’s disability community.
