Funeral of PE chilli queen, author on Friday
THE funeral of colourful Port Elizabeth chilli aficionado turned author – and one-time Playboy Bunny at the Playboy Club in New Orleans – Heidimarie Vos will be held on Friday.
Vos, 73, was an avid chilli fan and the author of a number of cookery books including Chilli South Africa and Passion for a Foodie, while in 2004 she initiated the annual Port Elizabeth Chilli Festival.
She died last week, having suffered ill health for some time as well as a debilitating skin condition.
Algoa FM presenter Charl Leslie, who interviewed Vos twice and later became a close friend, said he would remember her as one of the most colourful people he had interviewed on his show.
“She had a wicked sense of humour … and was furiously knowledgeable about food,” he said.
For many years Vos, along with Leslie and a few other friends, would meet weekly for lunch in Richmond Hill’s Stanley Street which the group called “The Strip”, often referring to themselves as “the strippers”.
“She was larger than life, super honest. I have nothing but nice things to say about her,” Leslie said.
Carole Law, who met Vos through Vos’s husband Alan, said she had found her funny and entertaining.
“She was very enterprising [and] very amusing.”
Born in the former Czechoslovakia in the final years of World War 2, Vos was separated from her family as a toddler and smuggled to Germany by an aunt.
In her teens, she was sent to the US to work as an au pair before making her way to New Orleans, where she became a Playboy Bunny at 19 during the 1960s.
Vos worked for Playboy supremo Hugh Hefner from 1963 to 1966.
After falling in love with a South African, Vos and her Port Elizabeth-born husband, Alan, moved to South Africa in 1991.
The two were actively involved in humanitarian work.
The funeral will be held at 2pm on Friday at the First Avenue Funeral Home in Walmer.