William (Will) Parry, longtime Chilmark resident and founder and owner of the William Parry Window Company, died after an extended illness, surrounded by family at his home in Chilmark on March 14.

He was 77.

Will was born in Forty Fort, Pa. on March 2, 1947, a son of Thomas Blighton Parry and Ida (Pickett) Parry. He attended public schools in Forty Fort and was a 1969 graduate of Penn State University.

A year later, he joined the Naval Air Force and began flight training. The Vietnam War, however, was nearing its end and there was a two-month wait for fledgling pilots to learn how to land on a ship. Both Will and Kirk Briggs from Middletown, Conn., a fellow fledgling pilot, were among those thanked for having joined the Naval Air Force, but told they were no longer needed. They would be paid for six more weeks and then would have to leave the Pensacola, Fla. base where they had been stationed.

“We went and had a beer and oysters and decided to go skiing at Jackson Hole, Wyo. with the money the Naval Air Force gave us,” Kirk Briggs remembered. “And when that gambit was over, I said ‘Let’s go to Martha’s Vineyard, where I’d visited on Hines Point in Vineyard Haven. We can build a house and sell it and we’ll have plenty of money to keep on skiing.’”

“So we came to Vineyard Haven and built the house on Weaver Lane where I still live, but Will went back to Pennsylvania. His father had a very successful milk processing plant there, but had decided to give it up. He offered the plant building to Will, who took him up on the offer. Will had fallen in love with wood when we were building the Vineyard house. He decided to sell the processing plant machinery and use the money from it to get started building doors and windows.”

Before long, he was making windows for Pennsylvania architect Peter Bowen, who was building a house for Microsoft founder Bill Gates and had done work for Yale University and the University of California.

“Peter Bowen gave me a job making windows for the Girl Scout center in Philadelphia,” Will remembered in an interview for the Vineyard Gazette’s Home & Garden magazine in 2007. ”It was he who really gave me my start.”

On another visit to the Vineyard to see Kirk Briggs, Will met Kathleen Cameron, an artist. She had just graduated from New York University and had come to the Vineyard to paint. She had grown up summers at Gay Head (today’s Aquinnah). They married and moved to New York, where Will opened a woodworking shop in Long Island City and began doing restorations of old buildings, while Kathleen taught art in Manhattan. Will did work on the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the Brill Building near Times Square where composer Irving Berlin had once had offices, on late-night television host Dave Letterman’s Tribeca apartment, and on the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.

In 1986, when they had two small children, the couple decided to move full-time to a house Kathleen had on the Middle Road in Chilmark.

Before long, Will had opened his William Parry Windows Company studio off Middle Road. He made windows there for the house on Quitsa Pond in Chilmark of Edward Miller and Marina von Opel, for the Edgartown art gallery of Garrett C. Conover with antique curved glass above rounded raised mahogany panels.

He built an octagonal cupola for a Camp Ground cottage in Oak Bluffs for former Vineyarder Robert Skydell, designed windows for the Makonikey home of Peter Farrelly of the filmmaking Farrelly brothers.

He made window frames and doors for homes designed by Peter Rose, who was head of the architecture department at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He also did work in West Tisbury for architect Marianne Thompson.

To assist him in his projects, he found help that would work hard and devotedly for him. Jerry Catlin, a former crab fisherman in the Aleutians, has been an employee for decades.

In addition to taking care of the William Parry Window Company, he found time to build a second home on 30 acres of fields in West Brattleboro, Vt., on land that reminded him of his Pennsylvania childhood. Two years ago, when the drive to Vermont began to feel too long in bad weather, he finally sold that home.

Will also always made sure to be a useful resident of Chilmark. He was a volunteer fireman for 25 years.

In his spare time, he enjoyed trips with his family and friends on his 20-foot un-named motorboat, exploring neighboring waters and visiting the Elizabeth Islands and, once, going as far away as Nantucket.

He is survived by his wife, Kathleen; a son, Cameron, of Chilmark, who has taken over his father’s business; a daughter, Caitlin Dolan of Wellesley; and four grandchildren: Orion and Apollo Parry of Chilmark, and Conor and Parry Dolan of Wellesley; a sister, Jane Rice of New York City; a son in law, Patrick Dolan of Wellesley; and a daughter in law, Allison Parry of Chilmark.

Memorial service arrangements will be announced at a later date.