In the mid 1960s Bache & Co. was the second largest retail brokerage company in the US (and probably the world) after Merrill Lynch, but like Merrill struggled to make the "top bracket" of wholesale investment banking firms (e.g. Morgan Stanley, First Boston, Goldman Sachs, etc.). Harold Bache still came into the office at 36 Wall Street daily, through the private elevator on the street, and attended weekly due diligence meetings in a stuffy room in the middle of the building, possibly designed to minimize these necessarily boring sessions. Bache's Research Department then included a range spanning Charlie Tatham, a patrician utility analyst and poet who co-authored "Graham and Dodd" and a street fighter from Brooklyn named Harvey Milk, who managed a bullpen of wannabe analysts in 1965 before he was shipped off to Dallas the next year for reasons not understood until later, when he became the "Mayor of Castro Street" in San Francisco.