SCOTTSBURG — In a busy world, a drive-thru often serves as one big dinner table for a lot people who’ve never met. But at the Scottsburg McDonald’s on Sunday night, strangers became family.

It started with a restaurant regular.

“She saw a dad in the van behind her,” said Hunter Hostetler, who watched it all unfold. “He had like four kids in the car, he had a bunch of happy meals, two Quarter Pounders, a Big Mac meal and some other stuff. She was like, ‘I’m going to pay for the father behind me, and I want you to tell him Happy Father’s Day.'”

But that dad didn’t just take the free meal. and run. He paid for a couple cars behind him.

A few drivers became 10. Ten drivers became 100.

“I had people telling me, ‘No, it’s going to stop here, It’s going to stop at 100. You’re not going to make it past,'” Hostetler recalled.

From 8:30 p.m. to midnight on Father’s Day, the good deeds under the golden arches didn’t stop. At the end of the night, 167 cars paid it forward.

“I thought it was pretty amazing,” said Abby Smith, who was a customer Sunday night. “You don’t see a lot of pay-it-forwards anymore.”

Smith and her boyfriend were car 161

“Probably anywhere in the world, something like this just doesn’t happen,” Hostetler said.

When it’s happening in a community already getting a bad wrap for a drug epidemic, stories like these make all the difference in the world.

“It’s a great feeling to know that there’s a lot of great people out there still,” Smith said.

Source: WDRB