Calvin Sneed, a retired senior news anchor and chief investigative reporter at WTVC-TV NewsChannel 9 in Chattanooga, currently serves as a freelance news anchor at WRCB-TV Local 3 News in Chattanooga.
He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, where in 1969, his first job was at Holston Valley Broadcasting’s WKPT Radio and TV at the age of 15. Sneed anchored the radio news breaks and worked part-time in production-master control at the TV station.
After high school in 1972, he went to Chattanooga to work for three years at WTVC-TV as a news reporter and photographer and 11 p.m. producer, while also attending the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He worked at a couple of Knoxville radio stations in 1975, before being hired at WATE-TV Channel 6 in Knoxville as a news reporter, photographer and anchor. His job duties included morning news/weather anchor, weekend sports anchor, noon news anchor and weekend news anchor.
When Sneed was promoted to co-anchor the 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts in 1979, he became the first African-American to anchor the main newscasts at a television station in East Tennessee, including the TV markets of Knoxville, Chattanooga and Tri-Cities in Johnson City, Kingsport and Bristol. He would also co-host “PM Magazine,” which spotlighted the lighter side of the news.
ETSPJ is featuring Sneed as part of Black History Month programming in February.
Join us Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025, at 12 p.m. Eastern for the Zoom session with Sneed at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84761732470.
WATE anchor Tearsa Smith will lead the interview with Sneed.
Sneed worked in television news broadcast in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986 to be a consumer reporter and anchor. He also co-hosted the first morning talk show in Columbus featuring movie reviews, new features, TV and movie star interviews and community happenings.
After six years, he returned to Chattanooga in 1992 to WTVC-TV to anchor NewsChannel 9’s new ConsumerWatch program. Calling the number 6-C-A-L-V-I-N became popular, because it seemed that all folks had to do was CALL CALVIN to get results, sometimes just threatening to call the number. It’s been estimated that from 1986 to 2007, he was able to recover in excess of $10 million dollars in goods, services and recovered money in cases where people did not get what they paid for. In the course of those stories, he’s been yelled at, spit at, roughed up, cussed out and, at one point, even shot at by upset business owners who’d gotten a personal visit from Sneed’s news cameras.
Sneed was honored by the Tennessee Legislature with a proclamation after an investigation that revealed that Tennessee law enforcement departments were forcing drivers pulled over by police to pay to get their confiscated vehicles back even after charges were later dropped. Sneed found a loophole in the law that allowed police to force innocent people to pay and not get their money back, and his series of reports resulted in a change in state law.
For 15 years, Sneed anchored the noon and 5:30 p.m. news in addition to consumer reporting. When NewsChannel 9’s main news anchor Bob Johnson retired in 2007, Calvin took the duties of 5, 6 and 11 p.m. news anchor at WTVC for the next 10 years.
He finally retired in 2017 after 48 full-time years in the business, 25 of those at WTVC. In 2024, he was named one of Chattanooga’s Business Elite and honored with the Homage Award for his years in television and service to viewers.
When not freelancing for WRCB-TV, Sneed is an avid “bridge hunter,” traveling hundreds of miles across the eastern United States, particularly the South, to photograph and document well-known, important steel truss bridges and concrete arch bridges before they’re destroyed. So far, he’s visited hundreds of bridges and taken thousands of pictures and is the author of three coffee table books of bridge pictures and facts.
He also is a frequent speaker about bridges to historical organizations, high school classes and civic groups. His information columns on old historic steel truss and concrete arch bridges currently run in newspapers in upper East Tennessee.
Sneed splits his time between Chattanooga and Kingsport with a soft spot for his hometown community. As an elementary school graduate of the old Douglass Elementary-High School, he currently operates a news and information website dedicated to the history of the school and the neighborhood.
He also is a member of the Dobyns-Bennett High School Alumni Hall of Fame, past board member of the Kingsport Library’s Friends of the Archives and a past board director and now honorary member of the Chattanooga-area Better Business Bureau.