Under Ron’s leadership, the Guild’s meetings, held at the Knickerbocker Hotel, attracted a great deal of public interest. Ron invited such notable speakers as the police commissioner of New York, the New York City coroner and a photojournalist who had recently returned from a safari through Indochinese tiger country. As few of the Guild members actually had firsthand knowledge about what they wrote, the speakers’ program Ron created gave them sources the writers would draw upon to make their stories far more authentic and compelling.

Ron also initiated a much needed campaign to attract new and as yet unpublished writers to the Guild, and he didn’t hesitate to provide new members with all-important introductions to established editors and publishers. He also freely shared his experience and gave advice to those writers less successful than he. The letters of gratitude from that era tell the story, letters from struggling writers of that period which express unbridled appreciation for Ron’s help. One, from a writer in North Bay, Ontario, says in part, “...it’s taken me nearly four years of blind groping to get the sort of stuff you’ve handed me from your experience as a writer.... I’m not likely to forget you took the trouble to grind out three pages of that experience, when honestly I expected a terse reply, if any at all.”