Daughter continues family legacy of running McDonald’s in San Antonio
Veronica Shields-Witter jokes that her first babysitter was the McDonald’s PlayPlace.
She’s visiting the fast-food restaurant at Walters Street and Interstate 35, a location that was operated her by parents Katherine and Charles Shields — they were the first Black McDonald’s franchisees in San Antonio.
Although the location has gone through several facelifts since it first opened its doors in 1981, Shields-Witter said she still remembers doing homework in the back of the restaurant, waiting for her mom and dad to finish their shifts.
Shields-Witters, 42, is grown with children of her own and is continuing their legacy of operating McDonald’s restaurants.
Her parents opened their first set of Golden Arches at the Walters Street and I-35 location more than 30 years ago, then opened a second location at the intersection of New Braunfels and Interstate 10.
But in 1995, when Veronica was only 13, tragedy struck the family when her father was killed in a car accident, leaving her mother to raise her and her four siblings while also running the two restaurants.
Despite the hardship, Katherine Shields went on to open a third location at Farm-to-Market Road 78 and Foster Road just a year later. Veronica Shields-Witter credits her mother’s faith and the East Side community’s support for her mother’s success.
“My mom prayed whether to sell the business or keep the business, and the Lord said, ‘Keep the business and keep moving forward,'” Shields-Witter recalled.
Eventually, the mother-daughter duo opened additional locations across the city.
Today, 93% of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent local business owners, with 33% of U.S. franchisees identifying as people of color, and 12% identifying as Black as of 2023.
While Katherine Shields went on to sell the original three locations, including the one at Walters Street and I-35, she kept it in the hands of a trusted friend and San Antonio entrepreneur Ned Stagg.
The family didn’t sell all their stores — Shields-Witter still is the owner and operator of the Converse and Windcrest locations. She is the only Black female McDonald’s franchisee in San Antonio.
A legacy to carry
In 1980, Katherine and Charles Shields moved to San Antonio with their two oldest children after becoming McDonald’s franchisees and being asked by the Chicago-based company to open a restaurant on the city’s East Side. Charles had formerly been an executive at a State Farm agency in Dallas, and Katherine had been working at Xerox.
Born and raised in San Antonio, Shields-Witter said she spent a lot of time at the restaurants with her family, playing, growing and learning. That’s where she met faithful, longtime employees, like Veronica De La Rosa, who says she’s been working at the Shields’ original East Side location for 10 years.
Speaking in Spanish, De La Rosa told the San Antonio Report she is thankful to the Shields family for hiring her a decade ago and changing her life for the better.
Flipping through a small pink photo album Shields-Witter has a dozen similar stories of employees over the years. She notes that it wasn’t uncommon for the occasional employee to come stay at their house for a little while, while trying to get back on their feet from tough situations.
“People come up to me and they share stories with me of how [my father] helped them get out of a situation, or they were homeless, and he helped co-sign them to get them in an apartment, or he purchased this building and helped rehab it,” Shields-Witter said. “… I’m still pulling the sheets back on things that my father did in the East Side community in the ’80s and the 90s that I knew nothing about still, still in 2025, so it’s just been so impactful.”
After the loss of her father, Shields-Witter recalls trying to step up to help her family run the restaurants and to help out with her younger brother, who was only eight months old at the time.
She went on to graduate from Incarnate Word High School and then Texas Christian University before going to work in Chicago for the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, a freight railroad that is one of six North American Class I railroads. She spent 11 years with the BNSF Railway as a frontline supervisor, working out in the rail yard before she transitioned into marketing for the company, where she climbed the corporate ladder until 2015.
But that year, Shields-Witter said she felt like she was being pulled back toward her calling — the family business. She moved back to San Antonio.
“My heart said, ‘Okay, you’ve got all this wonderful experience, you’ve built all these great relationships, but now it’s time to go and do the work that you were called to do,'” she said.
After helping her mother run several locations across San Antonio until 2021, Katherine Shields retired, selling several of her stores off and giving the remaining two to Veronica to manage.
She noted that many well-known political figures, especially East Side champions like Constable Kathryn Brown and Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4), have passed through her McDonald’s stores over the year, at times even using the Walters Street and I-35 restaurant as a meetup hub to help plan the annual MLK March — considered one of the largest Martin Luther King Jr. marches in the nation.
“I look a lot like my father, and I’m my mother’s twin,” she said. “I would just be in the store, or in the gas station, or wherever, and people would actually approach me and say, ‘You’re Charles Shields’ daughter, you’re Katherine’s daughter’ to this day.”
The next chapter
Ned Stagg was on a plane to Little Rock, Arkansas, when he read a copy of Black Enterprise Magazine that would change his course in life; the magazine included an article about how McDonald’s was the number one franchise opportunity for African Americans. At the time, Stagg was working in the oil and gas industry, but Stagg said he knew he wanted to work for himself one day.
That was about 20 years ago, setting Stagg on the path to becoming a franchisee himself. After saving up for more than a decade, Stagg decided to attend “Hamburger University” — McDonald’s training facility located in Chicago — where he learned about managing a restaurant and the company’s expectations.
Stagg, who now lives on the city’s far Northside near The Rim and La Cantera, is now the owner and operator of about 35 locations in San Antonio, including the three original locations that were owned and operated by the Shields family.
He said he couldn’t believe his ears when Katherine reached out to him to let him know she was considering retiring and selling several of her properties to him.
“I told her, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and we talked for a while, and I thought I’d talked her down,” Stagg said. But he hadn’t. In the following months, Shields started the process of putting those locations under Stagg, telling him she trusted him like family.
It’s a legacy Stagg said he tries his best to live up to. For him, success looks like hard work, a kind spirit and a good work ethic.
“I am happy to know the Shields family,” he said.
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