Lyle Lobel Warner, a longtime Cambridge resident, died in her beloved Mount Auburn Street apartment on Sept. 6. She was 84 and had summered on the Vineyard for many years.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., the daughter of Jewish immigrants much taken by the American Dream, she became part of a very American linguistic group: Brooklynites who unlearned the local accent in order to be accepted in the country as a whole. She took pride in fooling cab drivers, who could not tell where she was from.

After graduating from Smith College, Lyle came to Radcliffe, and there, in Cambridge, met Sam Bass Warner Jr., a future professor of history with whom she had four children: Rebecca, William, Kate (of West Tisbury) and Alice. In the wake of the second World War, she went to France to help care for Jewish orphans. Thus began a lifetime commitment to social work. She earned a master’s degree in the field from Washington University and a Ph.D. from Smith. She worked with people with addictions and studied the development of adopted children, as well as working with Selma Fraiberg doing further research on child development. She taught at Boston University and was a Bunting fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

A lover of learning, progressive politics, good food, classical music and birds, Lyle found her spiritual home in winters in Cambridge and summers on Martha’s Vineyard. She summered at Quenames for 10 years and then built a house on Tisbury Great Pond where she summered for 40 years. She was an avid birder and often went out with Ed Chalif, Susan Whiting, Vern Laux, Dooley Rosenwald, Jay Eliasburg, Norman Asher and others.

In her latter decades she was devoted to the peer-led courses at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, as well as to playing the piano, going to the symphony and taking walks in Mount Auburn Cemetery, where her ashes will be interred. She called her apartment building an unintentional retirement community and appreciated the many good friends she made there.

In her final years her mobility was increasingly restricted by emphysema. She missed many things: being able to travel the world, going on bird-watching trips, visiting New York, and going to the opera. And yet, in many ways, her last decade was her best, as she enjoyed the company of many friends and the steady growth and friendship of her four grandchildren: Dan, Eve, Sashka and Jonah.

A memorial service will be held at Levine Chapels, 470 Harvard Street, Brookline on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014 at 9:30 am.

In lieu of flowers, remembrances in her memory may be made to Food for Free in Cambridge (foodforfree.org).