Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School
Located four blocks east of Main Street on King Edward Boulevard, "Tupper" was the high school that Kenneth Fletcher, Deborah Fong, Jeanette Reinhardt and Paul Wong entered as Grade Eight students in 1968. Charles Rea and Annastacia McDonald, who are slightly older, also attended Tupper, as did Marlene MacGregor, who completed Grade Twelve there after landing in Vancouver from Toronto. (Carol Hackett attended King George High School in Vancouver's West End.)
Because school staff saw the group as responsible (Paul was Grade Eight president), they were given an unused room in which to organize their activities. This room, which they called the Art Room, was where the group took their breaks, did their homework and schemed.
Soon enough, the group started a large wall mural, a collaborative collage made up of two-dimensional objects -- bus transfers, photographs, tissue paper from gifts given and received -- that they contributed to over time, until the room was taken away from them and reassigned.
When speaking of the Art Room today, Charlie, Deborah, Jeannette and Paul acknowledge it as the germinal moment from which the Mainstreeters emerged.
