Italian Wine Podcast

Welcome to Episode 1076 Cynthia Chaplin interviews Iris Rideau, in this installment of Voices, on the Italian Wine Podcast. More about today’s guest: Iris Duplantier Rideau was born in the Crescent City section of New Orleans in 1936. She learned how to “pass for white” from her light-skinned grandmother. To escape the blatant racism of the South, Rideau convinced her mother to move to Los Angeles when Rideau was 12 years old. Forced to drop out of school when she became pregnant at 15, Rideau enrolled in night classes, determined not to spend her life working in dead-end jobs available to women of color. On her own, she landed a front-office job at an insurance agency. In 1967, Rideau founded her own insurance business, becoming the first minority/woman-owned firm to specialize in federally funded programs. She assisted LA’s Mayor Tom Bradley in developing the city’s first Affirmative Action Program. In the 1970s, she founded Rideau Securities and Investment Firm that specialized in pension planning for muni