Joseph Lyford; Journalism Professor, Award-Winning Author

Joseph Lyford, 74, retired author and professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He wrote “The Airtight Cage,” a book on the problems of inner cities, which won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award in 1967, after living for a year on New York’s Upper West Side. He also wrote “The Talk of Vandalia” about the changes in a small town in Illinois. A graduate of Harvard University who served in the Navy during World War II, Lyford worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor before beginning his teaching career at Berkeley in 1966. On Wednesday in Rheem, Calif., of Alzheimer’s disease.