Kyle Dareff brought 1960s-era protest songs to preschool in Maine.
“I’d sing them for show-and-tell, which I’m sure they loved,” says the Minnesota woman with a laugh.
Now a lawyer, Kyle Dareff investigates civil rights abuses.
Both things bear the fingerprints left by her father, Scott Dareff, SMHS PA ’76, and his outsized influence that lingers after his untimely death in 1996.
“He was just a very socially conscious guy, and he instilled that in me and my sister,” Kyle Dareff says. “To me my dad was always doing the right thing, and was always involved in the community.”
Scott Dareff’s activism, and his pioneering career as a physician assistant, can each be traced to his time as a student at GW during the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s. Dareff played a central role in the vigorous campus protest movement against the Vietnam War. He served as the movement’s unofficial medic, patrolling the crowds in a bandana and tending to the wounded. It was a time of police batons and tear gas, of such tension that escalating protests led President Lloyd Hartman Elliott to shut down campus and cancel final exams in May 1970. Students in the movement reported being scarred physically and psychologically by a university administration they felt actively conspired against them.
“The bitterness from that period regarding the behavior of the university still lingers,” says Michael Marcus, CCAS BA ’73, another protest leader and close friend of Dareff’s. “[The administration’s] refusal to actually support its students facing an unjust war was monumental.”
Dareff’s experience of the protests started a theme that defined his life: combining social consciousness with professional pursuits. He later volunteered at the former Georgetown Free Clinic before becoming one of the early graduates of GW’s Physician Assistant program, established in September 1972 and among the first of its kind in the nation.
Dareff’s journey with his wife, Marci Dareff-Wenn, a social worker, and their two daughters continued after graduation in Skowhegan, Maine, where he was one of the first PAs to run shifts at an emergency room. At a later stop in Atlanta came another milestone: he was among the first PAs to participate in a “flight for life” emergency medical helicopter transport program at Georgia Baptist Hospital.
He also volunteered with Doctors Without Borders, helping to establish an emergency medical aid clinic near the front lines of the Bosnia civil war.
Dareff and his family eventually settled in Lake Placid, New York, where he continued his PA practice, while also indulging his many hobbies, including acting in plays, strumming his guitar and teaching CPR to area kids.
“My dad was an amazing father who loved his girls more than anything,” says Kyle Dareff. “He taught us to be kind to everyone, keep an open mind, always ask questions and never accept the status quo. He was a special guy.”
Just after Christmas in 1995, Scott Dareff suffered a debilitating stroke. A few months later, in February 1996, he passed away when a blood clot traveled to his heart. He was 45 years old.
Marcus, his close friend and college classmate, has worked to tell the tale of “this everyday hero.” In assessing Dareff’s time at GW, and his time after, he notes his friend’s optimism.
“He took the lemons we were dealt,” he says, “and turned it into lemonade.”
