Peter M. Williamson, the former Oak Bluffs chief of police who served on the town force for 32 years, 28 of them as chief, died Wednesday at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was 70 and had suffered a brain hemorrhage.

He was appointed chief by the Oak Bluffs selectmen in 1966 at the age of 29.

In a speech on the occasion of Chief Williamson’s retirement in September of 1993, police chief John McCarthy, his colleague in the neighboring town of Tisbury, said:

“As chief of police it is a requirement to have a knowledge of the community, the ability to listen, ability to evaluate, to be impartial, to be principled, to be patient, persistent, to be a good organizer, to be honest and reliable. Peter Williamson has all these attributes in abundance.”

Known for his sharp tongue matched by an equally sharp sense of humor, Peter Williamson was a quintessential small town chief who practiced the art of community policing decades before the term came into vogue. “I am going to miss being able to guide people and assist them in getting on the right track. I’m going to miss doing that,” he told the Gazette in an interview when he retired.

He headed law enforcement during a number of historic events in Oak Bluffs, including the early spring day in 1980 when the ferry Islander nearly sank after running into an uncharted rock at low tide in Nantucket Sound, and the filming of the movie Jaws in the summer of 1974, much of which took place on the Joseph Sylvia State Beach. “They were nice — Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider weren’t even stars then,” he said of the Hollywood crowd in a 1993 interview in the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. “I remember the old stars,” he reminisced in the same interview. “Robert Ryan. Gloria Swanson had that big house on Temahigan avenue in Eastville — with the half moon window. Some people said she was seeing old Joe Kennedy there. I don’t know about that but I do remember seeing James Cagney talking to Dana Andrews, right on the corner on Circuit avenue.”

And when he was not patrolling the streets of Oak Bluffs or riding the desk at police headquarters — the site of the old Tivoli Building near the waterfront where he did his first detail as a summer cop in 1962 working wrestling matches for $1.75 an hour — Chief Williamson could be found on the golf course, at some remote beach on Chappaquiddick surf casting for blues, or on a pond raking quahaugs, his favorite pastime.

He was also a dedicated family man.

“I know it has been difficult for my two kids. As a police chief my family and I have lived under a microscope. I was always concerned that they were guided in the right direction. Our lives were always under close scrutiny. I had to conduct myself as an example at all times and my kids had to do the same,” he told the Gazette in the 1993 interview.

Peter McLaren Williamson was born on Dec. 3, 1937 in Arlington, the son of Elizabeth Manderino Williamson and David Williamson. His grandparents on his mother’s side came from Italy and settled in Arlington. His father was an electrician. The family moved to the Vineyard in 1944 when his father took a job at the Navy base on the Island. Peter attended Oak Bluffs schools and graduated from the Oak Bluffs High School in 1956. After graduation he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he became a light weapons infantry man. He was honorably discharged in November of 1958.

He returned to the Vineyard and took a job at DeBettencourt’s garage in Oak Bluffs. He came to know Bob Lucas, a state police trooper who would come to the garage to get his gas and cigarettes. During one of his stops he told Peter he had heard there was a position open for a patrolman on the Oak Bluffs police force. He encouraged Peter to apply for the job, and he did.

He began his career in law enforcement as a summer cop in 1961. “I remember when Circuit avenue was quiet. It was serene and family oriented,” he told the Gazette.

He passed his civil service examination in 1963.

He met Judith Mary Catlow of Oak Bluffs in the summer of 1964. Even though they had gone to the same school they were six years apart and had not known each other. They were married on Oct. 3, 1964 in a double ring ceremony at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church in Oak Bluffs. They had two children: Timothy and Julie, who both live on the Vineyard. Timothy is the police sergeant in Oak Bluffs.

In 1966 he was appointed to the top post after Chief Richard W. Blankenship resigned.

He retired in 1993 and was simultaneously roasted and showered with accolades at a gathering at the Atlantic Connection that included a cake decorated with toy police cars and badges.

At home he fed the squirrels and birds in his yard every morning.

“He was hard as a rock and soft as a feather,” his wife Judith said yesterday.

“I knew both sides of the person,” said his lifelong friend Robert Murphy of Oak Bluffs, who grew up across the street from Peter and later worked as an Oak Bluffs police officer for 10 years. “I knew him as a true friend and as a mentor on the police — I knew him as the boss but also as a person who had a softer, compassionate side to him, something most people didn’t get to see. His death is a real loss to all of us because he was a very compassionate person, once you broke through that shell.”

Flags flew at half staff in Oak Bluffs yesterday and the entrance to the Everett A. Rogers Municipal Building, which houses police headquarters, was draped in black bunting.

In addition to his wife of 44 years, he is survived by his two children and their spouses: Julie and John Moffet of Edgartown and their children Caroline Victoria and Margaret Mei Xiao, and Tim and Liza Hanley Williamson of West Tisbury and their daughter Emma Gannon Williamson and son Maxwell C. Ferro; a sister, Elizabeth Lopes of Osterville and her children, Matthew and Heather Jenkinson of Milford and Nancy Jean of Hyannis; a brother, Richard Williamson of Sacramento, Calif., and his children Wayne, Warren and Wheeler Williamson and Wendy Arnold, all of California. He was predeceased by his brother Thomas David Williamson in 1986, and is survived by Thomas’s children, Jennifer and Howard Marlin of Vineyard Haven, Jessica Williamson and Alex Czarowicz of Hanover, and Greg and Lesley Williamson of Vineyard Haven.

Visiting hours will be at the Chapman Cole and Gleason Funeral Home in Oak Bluffs on Sunday, Jan. 27 from 4 to 7 p.m. A funeral Mass will be held on Monday, Jan. 28 at 11 a.m. at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church in Oak Bluffs. Interment will follow in the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Oak Bluffs.

Donations may be made in his memory to Hospice of Martha’s Vineyard, P.O. Box 2549, Oak Bluffs MA 02557.