"Everything at that time was 'wide open.' Disorganization reigned supreme. There was no head to anything. At night myself and a companion would go over to a gorgeously furnished faro-bank and get our midnight lunch. Everything was free. There were over twenty keno-rooms running. One of them that I visited was in a Baptist church, the man with the wheel being in the pulpit and the gamblers in the pews.
"While there, the manager of the telegraph office was arrested for something I never understood, and incarcerated in a military prison about half a mile from the office. The building was in plain sight from the office and four stories high. He was kept strictly incommunicado. One day, thinking he might be confined in a room facing the office, I put my arm out of the window and kept signaling dots and dashes by the movement of the arm. I tried this several times for two days. Finally he noticed it, and, putting his arm through the bars of the window, he established communication with me. He thus sent several messages to his friends, and was afterward set free."
Another curious story told by Edison concerns a fellow operator on night duty at Chattanooga Junction at the time he was at Memphis: "When it was reported that Hood was marching on Nashville, one night a Jew came into the office about eleven o'clock in great excitement, having heard the Hood rumor. He, being a large sutler, wanted to send a message to save his goods. The operator said it was impossible--that orders had been given to send no private messages. Then the Jew wanted to bribe my friend, who steadfastly refused, for the reason, as he told the Jew, that he might be court-martialed and shot. Finally the Jew got up to eight hundred dollars. The operator swore him to secrecy and sent the message. Now, there was no such order about private messages, and the Jew, finding it out, complained to Captain Van Duzer, chief of telegraphs, who investigated the matter, and while he would not discharge the operator, laid him off indefinitely. Van Duzer was so lenient that if an operator was to wait three days and then go and sit on the stoop of Van Duzer's office all day he would be taken back. But Van Duzer swore that if the operator had taken eight hundred dollars and sent the message at the regular rate, which was twenty-five cents, it would have been all right, as the Jew would be punished for trying to bribe a military operator; but when the operator took the eight hundred dollars and then sent the message deadhead he couldn't stand it, and he would never relent."