It began as a casual conversation in a doorway during the Atlas Foundation’s Teddy Dinner Thursday night at the Hilton Garden Inn in Bloomfield. It turned into something of an education for someone arrogant enough to think he had a pretty good handle on what was going on in this community.

“My son, John, has Down’s syndrome,” Carl Vuotto began.

“When he was five and he was coming out of the Joan Kennedy School (in Port Richmond, an early-intervention program for those so afflicted from birth to age five), I saw there were no intramural programs like they have at other schools.”

None at the Seton Foundation for Learning’s Mother Franciska Elementary School on the grounds at St. Joseph Hill Academy in Arrochar, and none at Bishop Ahern HS on Moore Catholic’s Graniteville campus for those who age-out of the elementary school.

That would be immediately obvious to the Westerleigh resident: Vuotto was running St. Teresa’s program at the time.

That was 10 years ago, and Vuotto resolved to change that.

“All” it would take is money and facilities.

“The Atlas Foundation didn’t exist then,” Vuotto said, “but Teddy (Atlas) had a son playing at St. Teresa’s (home also to Vuotto’s three older sons). The first thing he did was give me two tickets – ringside seat – to an Oscar de la Hoya fight.

“’Here, raffle these off.’

“We did, and we made a couple of hundred dollars.

“The next year,” Vuotto said, “Teddy started the Atlas Foundation, and through Tom Conway (an original committee member), he knew what we were doing.

“’We’ll help,’” he said.

The Atlas Foundation has – “No questions asked,” Vuotto said – with this program which includes basketball, baseball and swimming intramurals.

Atlas dollars pay for pool time at the Elizabeth Connelly Center, for baseball hats and T-shirts, for a uniform and a basketball for each youngster in the program which begins tomorrow morning at St. Joseph Hill.

“The kids have a very short attention span, maybe 20 minutes,” Vuotto said, “so they need one on one.”

The students at Hill provide that, but their commitment to these youngsters is a story for another day.

The point here is this is one of a bunch of the Atlas Foundation’s less dramatic annual good works, the kind that don’t draw the attention of those Teddy talked about Thursday night: A wheelchair ... aiding a family after its home burned down … a refrigerator for an elderly women … making it possible for a father to see his sick son in the hospital every day.

Less dramatic unless a program like Vuotto’s was in danger of going out of business.

The point here is that every year there are more and more demands on the foundation and that Islanders’ needs are beginning to outstrip the dollars raised at its annual dinner. Thursday, Teddy likened himself to the foundation’s CEO and the audience to the stockholders. “Our dividends are good works and our greatest asset is you,” he said.

“You” can do more than shake your head (and, hopefully, say a prayer of thanksgiving) the next time you see a youngster with Down’s syndrome.

“You” can be part of an operation which gives immediate help to your neighbors in times of crisis, which doesn’t subject them to bureaucratic red tape and often rob them of their dignity.

The kids at PS 35 in Sunnyside showed us how. Thursday night, fifth-grader Joshua Kahn presented the foundation with $315 the school’s students had collected in a penny drive.

We can follow those youngsters’ example. Checks made out to the Dr. Theodore A. Atlas Foundation may be mailed to the foundation at Post Office Box 140998, Staten Island, 10314.