Charles Rosen, 82, of Teaneck, who — with Victor Wouk — helped create one of the earliest practical prototypes of a hybrid car, doesn’t drive a hybrid. He drives a Honda Civic.

His explanation: “It’s a matter of cost.”

In his Teaneck garage, Rosen still keeps an electrical engine — an alternate for the internal-combustion engine used in the actual prototype car.

After the Environmental Protection Agency, in one of the most colossally dopey decisions ever made by a government agency, turned down the Wouk-Rosen prototype, Rosen gave up his auto-research activities and went to work as a management consultant.

Surveys have shown that people who do tend to be older, richer, better educated, and more technologically savvy. They also tend to consume organic food, yogurt, and decaffeinated coffee and are predominantly Democrats and independents

Here are some well-known people who have bought hybrid cars:

Kevin Bacon, Ed Begley Jr., Jack Black, Billy Crystal, Ted Danson, Johnny Depp, Cameron Diaz, Leonard DiCaprio, Ellen DeGeneres, Kirk Douglas, David Duchovny, Kirsten Dunst, Larry David, Will Ferrell, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Woody Harrelson, Salma Hayek, Arianna Huffington, Billy Joel, Bill Maher, Donna Mills, Jack Nicholson, Ed Norton, Donny Osmond, Brad Pitt, Prince Charles, Robert Reiner, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams, Dr. Oliver Sachs, Alicia Silverstone, Meryl Streep, Sting, Dr. Andrew Weil.

W.B.

Sources: hybridCARS; “The Essential Hybrid Car Handbook,” by Nick Yost
(The Lyons Press)

Around 1900, he introduced an “electric carriage” that had two electric motors connected to the front wheels. It could travel 35 miles an hour, but not for long distances. Later Porsche introduced a hybrid car, with an internal-combustion engine to supply the electricity.

In 1903 Porsche put together a car with electric motors at all four wheels. It could reach 70 miles an hour.

Later, Porsche was instrumental in building the Volkswagen Beetle (at Hitler’s behest), the Mercedes Benz SS/SSK, and the Porsche, along with various military tanks used by Nazi Germany in World War II.

On Dec. 15, 1945, the French arrested Porsche as a war criminal and he spent 20 months in a Dijon prison.

W.B.

For Yossi Zablocki, it was the phone call of a lifetime.

Last February, the manager at Kutsher’s Country Club, the last kosher resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains, called him in a panic with news that owner Mark Kutsher was thinking of retiring and closing down the place.

Zablocki, 37, had spent his summers growing up at the famed resort in Monticello, N.Y., graduating from camper to lifeguard to gabbai and leader of High Holiday services. Suddenly he had an opportunity to realize a lifelong dream — and he jumped at it.

Kutsher’s was all about people, says Ron Mintz, who spent many weekends and family vacations there while he was growing up in Paramus.

Yes, says the 35-year-old Mintz, the appeal of the hotel was multi-faceted: It was a convenient place to take the kids because of all the activities — “things kids could do and the adults would have their own diversions.” There was Ping Pong, swimming, Simon Says (for both kids and adults); a sports camp; tennis; ice skating in the winter; and shuffleboard, which is “almost an extinct pastime,” Mintz observes.

Up in the Catskills, a man named Yossi Zablocki is trying to save the last blintz palace of my generation’s youth. The place is called Kutsher’s Country Club.

Once, in another world, I spent a lot of time there covering basketball players and boxers in training for their big fights and sports clinics that drew 500 high school and college coaches from all over the country for a week each summer to study under coaching giants like Red Auerbach, Nat Holman, Ara Parseghian, and Adolph Rupp.

The man who made it all work was named Milton Kutsher.

Roz Green has been going to Kutsher’s for “at least 30 years” — and, says the Cliffside Park resident, she “will be going for yuntif this year too.”

“It’s haimish,” she says. “I like the people who come there.” She’s made many friends at Kutsher’s over the decades, she adds, “and some are still around.”

“It was fun to work there,” says Harry Galinsky, a former superintendent of schools in Paramus. As an educator, he was off in the summers, he explains, and spent six weeks there in the ’50s as maitre d’hôtel. He enjoyed “a tremendous relationship with other staff members. It was a prize job for young people,” he notes, “what with being in the country and out of the hot city and making enough money to pay for college.”