Updated 6/23/2010: Emma Frid, a furniture maker’s wife whose quiet support furthered the career of her influential husband and helped give life to Fine Woodworking magazine, has died at age 92.

Mrs. Frid, widow of the late Tage Frid, passed away last Friday at a Rhode Island nursing home.

Friends remembered her as a lifelong source of calm and strength for her husband as he pursued his career and achieved renown as a furniture maker, teacher and author.

“She definitely was a powerful force and a real partner with Tage,” recalled teacher and furniture maker John Dunnigan, a former student of Frid’s who edited two volumes of his classic book series Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking. “She was very involved in all of his work.”

Frid, who died in 2004, influenced generations of woodworkers through his writing and his teaching. Frid started the first college-level program in woodworking and furniture design at Rhode Island School of Design in 1962. He was firmly established in his teaching career when, in 1975, he became one of Fine Woodworking‘s first contributing editors.

Because of his training in old-world woodworking traditions and his skills as a teacher, Frid helped give Fine Woodworking a voice of authority, and his contributions became hallmarks of the magazine’s early success. But it might not have happened without Emma’s persistence.

When the magazine started, “I was not interested at all,” in writing for it, Frid recalled in 1979. “Never having written an article, I felt I was not qualified, but my wife finally talked me into it.”

Emma Jacobsen Frid was born in 1918 and raised in a family of 13 children in the farm country of northern Denmark. She and Frid were married in 1946, and the couple lived briefly in Iceland before coming to the U.S. in 1948 for Frid’s first teaching assignment.

Furniture makers Jere Osgood and William Keyser, who studied with Frid at the Rochester Insitute of Technology in the late ’50s, said students at RIT saw Mrs. Frid only at the occasional reception or visit to their instructor’s home. Still, Osgood remembered her as ” a wonderful, pleasant person” whose calm demeanor seemed to counterbalance her husband’s restless energy.

Keyser, a professor emeritus at RIT, said Frid “depended a great deal on her,” and remembered that Frid always insisted on having Emma accompany him when he travelled to workshops and other teaching engagements.

“They were a team,” Dunnigan said. “She was a huge part of his success, but it would not have been in her character to take credit for anything like that.”

Emma Frid is survived by three sisters; a son, Peter Frid of Madbury, NH; a daughter, Ann Randall of Middletown, RI; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family as that donations be made to the Tage and Emma Frid Scholarship Fund at RISD, Attn: Amanda Wright, RISD Development Office, Two College Street, Providence, RI 02903

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