The "Corny Collins Show" in Hairspray is loosely based on the Baltimore teen dance program called the "Buddy Deane Show." One Baltimore woman fought to get black teens on the popular show back in 1958. "I told him I thought it was terrible," Melva Lee Scruggs said about the "Buddy Deane Show." Buddy Deane was the host of a Baltimore dance show that ran on TV from 1957 to 1964 six days a week. The show featured only white kids dancing, so Scruggs wrote him a letter in the fall of 1958 to tell him that's not fair. "I felt that black kids should be allowed to come on the show. When he got the letter, I don't know how long after, he called my mother. I ran home from school, and she said Buddy Dean wants you to call him," Scruggs said. Scruggs called, and Deane said she could bring 20 friends to the show. He sent her tickets. She rounded up her friends, and they went. "It was called Negro Day, and they had it once a month after the initial group appeared. That was my group," Scruggs said. Just four years earlier the Supreme Court decided the landmark "Brown vs. the Board of Education" decision that forced school integration around the country. Scruggs, then Melva Lee, was one of the black students to integrate Forest Park High School in northwest Baltimore. "Of course, we told everyone at school that black kids were going to be on the show, so the day we were on there, everybody was watching, so it was very exciting," Scruggs said. Even though the show was on six days a week, the black kids got to appear much more infrequently. "I thought we should be on the show, because we could dance, and he felt so, too, but they never had the white kids and black students together on the show," Scruggs said. People picketed outside the WJZ studios where the show was held. Published reports said the station wanted to integrate the show. When Deane took it to a committee of white kids who appeared as regulars, they said no, their parents wouldn't allow them on the show if that happened. Deane was eventually let go as a way of solving the problem, and the show ended in 1964. Scruggs said after seeing John Water's "Hairspray," she thought of writing to him many times but did not. When WBAL-TV held auditions for "Hairspray Live," she decided to tell him her story and sent a letter. More than 50 years later, she knows the separation was wrong, but has no regrets about what she did to try to change things. "That was the way things were at the time," Scruggs said.