MADE FROM SCRATCH

Grandma’s cooking was the best. It might have been the meatloaf, could have been her chicken soup she served when you weren’t feeling good; or was it the hot bread or chocolate cake fresh out of the oven? No matter which, it was always just right. So you dug into her old recipe box, hoping that you, too, could use her formula to produce those wonderful things for the next generation. 



But her notes on those dog-eared recipes didn’t quite make sense.

  • Butter the size of an egg (no mention of how big an egg)
  • A pinch of this
  • A dash of that
  • About so much of another
  • Bake til done

What the notes didn’t need to say was it was all put together with what she had available at the time. If something were missing, her experience told her what to use as a substitute. Finally, it was all mixed up with care and love. 

In short, it was made from scratch.


Pretty much the same here at The RAF. Twenty years ago we started to fill up our own recipe box with some things that we thought folks might like. Like Grandma, we do a lot of our mixing and cooking by trial and error, using the ingredients at hand.

  • Passion, as much as you can get in
  • A pinch of cash
  • A dash of naïveté 
  • About so much smarts
  • Bake til done (Adjusting the temperature as needed)

So like Grandma’s recipes, The RAF has been built from scratch. Our work was not always perfect, but it was done with what we had at hand, with as much passion as we could get in.

I bet if Grandma were starting over today, she’d take advantage of modern conveniences, like readily available fresh ingredients, mixers that mix, and stoves that cook evenly and precisely each time.


It is the same here at The RAF. We are always trying fresh ways of doing things to accomplish the mission – to be more targeted and accurate to help us serve all who sit at The RAF table.

And just like your grandma, we’ll do our best to continue to mix the ingredients with care, because we think stuff is just better when made from scratch.


-John McKenna

Submitted June 6, 2023

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A Christmas gift of flight lessons from his parents started Scott Anttila’s aviation journey in 1985. “I learned at Johnson Field, a small grass strip tucked into the woods in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and that early exposure to simple backcountry flying stuck with me,” Scott says. Growing up in the U.P., he spent a lot of time outdoors and found that flying was another way to get to the places he liked to explore—especially the ones most people never saw. As he earned more ratings and eventually moved to the Detroit area for work, Scott realized he needed a way to stay connected to northern Michigan. He bought an airplane and used it to get back to the smaller airstrips and lake country he enjoyed. Along the way, he also flew gliders out of Frankfort, soaring along the Sleeping Bear Dunes and towing sailplanes over the Great Lakes. “Those flights gave me a different appreciation for the landscape and made me even more interested in the small, out-of-the-way airports scattered around the state,” he says. Visiting those kinds of places, Scott first came across the Recreational Aviation Foundation. He started using RAF-supported airstrips both inside and outside Michigan. “I noticed how well-kept they were and how much access they opened up,” he says, adding, ”Over the years, I’ve watched a number of grass strips close, which made the RAF’s mission feel especially important to me. Maintaining these airstrips keeps aviation connected to the outdoors and makes it possible for more people to reach the quiet, remote areas that inspired me to fly in the first place.” Scott joins the other two RAF Michigan Liaisons, General Grant and Tanmoy Ganguly. He can be reached at santtila@theraf.org . Submitted December 11, 2025.