South Aussies love Mile End’s Cafe de Vilis but the love affair almost never happened
THERE’S an old saying that it’s better to be lucky than good but Adelaide’s favourite pieman Vili Milisits can lay claim to both.
THERE’S an old saying that it’s better to be lucky than good but Adelaide’s favourite pieman Vili Milisits can lay claim to both.
There is no doubt he is a star pieman but twice now Milisits has narrowly escaped an early death.
Last month an out-of-control car almost killed him outside his Mile End bakery. To Milisits it was an eerie reminder of another car accident 40 years earlier which almost ended in disaster.
Mr Milisits has told The Advertiser how an accident on the road from Blanchetown almost killed his family in 1974.
Mr Milisits was driving back from his sister’s shack after a weekend of fishing, with his wife Rosemary, son Simon and a friend, when he was run off the road.
“We travelled that road quite a lot,” Mr Milisits says.
“But this driver ... run me off the bloody road and I don’t know how, but the car started spinning and as I went off the road the car spun around.
“How it could spin I’ve got no idea but just before we hit the trees my car stopped.”
The 65-year-old remembers having no injuries but being shaken by the near miss.
It was the first of what aretwo close calls for the Hungarian migrant — both involving a motor vehicle.car. Mr MilisitsHe was nearly hit by a car outside his busy Mile End eatery last month, walking away with a bump to the head and more than a few sore joints.
The Advertiser understands a man had arranged to take a car for a test drive but snatched the keys, pushed the owner over and sped off.
Vili, who was directing cafe traffic and soaking up some much-needed sunshine, had to leap out of the way. “He took off like a rocket, I thought this guy was trying to kill me or something,” Mr Milisits says.
“I was standing on the driveway there and all of a sudden I heard this screeching and when I turned around this car was almost on top of me.
“I was trying to get away from him but he was swaying and so we had a situation of ‘what do I do’ so I decided to do a backflip.
“This guy took off on the wrong side of the street.” Security camera vision from the incident shows workers rushing to Mr Milisits’s aid after he dodged the dangerously driven car.
The near-death experiences have given the Pie Man a chance to reflect, and he says he now realises that he is a “lucky bastard”. “It’s the second time in my life when I thought it was it,” he says.
Meanwhile, lawyers for Mr Milisits appeared in the Full Court of the Supreme Court yesterday as part of the baker’s continuing defamation action against the State Government.
Mr Milisits claims the Government defamed him by linking his custard Berliners with a 2012 food poisoning outbreak — an assertion the Government denies. Yesterday, the pieman’shis lawyers asked the Full Court to grant their clientaccess to the transcripts of confidential interviews with those poisoned in the food poisoning outbreak to better inform his action against the Government.
The court has reserved its decision.