John Reuling was born in 1906 in Osceola, Nebraska. He graduated from Michigan State College and later received the M.A. from Cornell University. He was a missionary teacher of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) at Adams College, Natal, South Africa (1927-1941), where he was director of teacher training. He also was farm manager and Vice-Principal of Adams College and District Commissioner for the African Boy Scouts. John Reuling He was Africa Secretary for the ABCFM and then an administrator for its successor, the United Church of Christ's Board for World Ministries (UCBWM), serving as regional secretary for Africa (1946-1962) and then General Secretary for Mission (1962- 1972). In this capacity he traveled to Africa, including Angola, Rhodesia, Togo, Ghana and South Africa (he returned briefly to South Africa in the mid-1950s when Adams College was being absorbed under the apartheid regime). Between 1942 and 1945, he was President of Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin, where he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1945. He also served as President of Carleton College, Minnesota. He retired in 1971. John Reuling died in Port Huron in 1990.

Eleanor Swanson Reuling was born in 1903 and graduated from Michigan State College. She married John Reuling in 1926 and in 1927 was appointed an ABCFM missionary to South Africa. She was an educational missionary in South Africa, taught at Adams College and tutored students. She published First Saint to the Zulus, a short biography of missionary James C. Bryant in 1960. Her M.A. entitled “A Graded Program of Outside Reading for American Children Being Educated Abroad”was awarded at MAC in 1934. Eleanor Reuling died in 1983.

The Reulings may have been the first married couple at MAC.

(For further biographical notes see: Guide to the John and Eleanor Reuling Papers Compiled by Martha Lund Smalley, Yale University Library, Divinity Library Special Collections, 1997, 2003: http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/divinity.120.con.html )