Chauncey (Bill) Christian Jr., 77, of Oak Bluffs died Dec. 25 at Harborside Healthcare Center in Mashpee after a long illness.

Bill was born in Louisville, Ky. The family left Kentucky when Bill was two years old for Indiana, where he went to grammar school. Eventually the family moved to New York city where his father, Chauncey Sr., opened his CPA practice near Rockefeller Center. Bill graduated from George Washington High School and was class president.

Bill has been fortunate to have been employed continuously since graduation from New York University in June 1950 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a commission in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

He started with RCA in July of that year and remained with them until 1969 with the exception of a 21-month tour of active Air Force duty during the Korean Conflict and a 9-month leave of absence in 1955 to get a master's degree from New York University. At RCA, Bill worked both in the mechanical and electrical machine design for the manufacturing and testing of vacuum tube and solid-state devices.

Later, he established and managed a calibration lab to test microwave parameters from D.C. to 18,000 Gigahertz (48 million cycles per second.) Bill was loaned to a RCA California lab to help qualify a low noise, tunnel diode. When finished he went back to his plant to do the qualification of a Navy amplifier that the diodes inputted. Bill later designed the testing and qualification of a solid state doubler for the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) project.          

While on active duty in the Air Force, Bill trained to be an electronics officer and in that capacity set up and got operational automatic tracking radar for a Strategic Air Command radar bomb scoring detachment in Denver, Colo.

Upon discharge, he returned to New York and rejoined the same department at RCA in January 1952 but in the electrical section. During this time, he also qualified to take the professional engineer's exam. In 1961, Bill obtained a master's degree in management engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

When the family moved to New England, Bill resigned from RCA and became a project engineer with Raytheon's Wayland Lab's electrical department which was involved with the electronics for the Missile Site Radar program. He was promoted to technical director of the program to plan the installation qualification of an MSR system components testing station.

After successful completion of that task, Bill became a team manager for the manufacturing of these components. The Defense Dept. cancelled program after accepting components for two sites.

At this time, Bill was offered a position at Polaroid. He joined the Quality Control area of Polaroid's film division as head of Sanstrometry (the science of measuring film quality.)

After working in various aspects of film quality control he became part of the Engineering Division where he did fault analysis on microchip failures and soon became part of the electronics manufacturing and development engineering group.

Bill then became the communications interface for the offshore sourcing of outsourced electronics made in Taiwan and Japan. He was sent to Japan to introduce a new product to a Japanese vendor and later introduced the project to a Taiwanese vendor.

Bill was soon sent to work with vendors in Scotland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico and Germany. When it was decided to help establish a factory in Shanghai, Bill's manager asked him to organize a program required to lay out a factory to insert and solder components on an electronic strobe's printed circuit boards for an acceptable qualification of this product. That required bringing the Shanghai factory cadre to the U.S. for a six-week training program to teach them to be proficient with this technique and equipment needed to be able to manufacture, test and qualify this product.

Upon successful completion of this start-up, Bill was asked to do the same thing for a Russian factory in Obnisk Kaluga region of Russia, but this time with automatic insertion equipment. The Russian director of the plant was so pleased that Bill was awarded a certificate for his contribution made to redevelopment of international relations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

He cherished this along with his 1955 RCA Golden Achievement Award, plus his becoming a professional engineer in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, where he was asked to publish and edit the first periodic magazine of the Massachusetts professional engineers, the Mass. P.E. Minuteman, and to represent that society as its designated member on the state Safe Housing Design Board.

Bill was a life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society. In 1989, he received a master's of business administration degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (thereby becoming an alumnus of four universities.) In 1993, Bill retired from Polaroid after 20 years.

In 1969, the family settled in Framingham. Bill was a member of the Board of Assessors and a valued volunteer in his church, the Unitarian Universalist Society. He and his wife were members of the Couples Club and danced for 25 years with the Silver Grays.

Bill was a member of the board of directors for the Oak Bluffs Council on Aging for more than two years and a year-round Oak Bluffs resident since October 2001. He and his wife of 49 years, Anita, had visited the Vineyard since the 1950s.

Bill was an avid book collector and enjoyed music from the classics to jazz. More than anything else he valued his family. He spoke lovingly of his wife and was very proud of his daughters.

Survivors include his wife Anita; his two daughters, Karin Graves and her husband Michael and Linda Jean McVey and her husband Cameron; a sister Roberta Steele and her husband Robert; and several nieces, nephews and many friends.

A celebration of Bill's life is scheduled for June 15 at the Unitarian Universalist Society, Main street, Vineyard Haven, followed by a reception at the council on aging, 21 Wamsutta avenue, Oak Bluffs.

Donations may be made to the Unitarian Universalist Society Memorial Fund, Main street, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568.