Need fresh eyes to see what I'm missing

Input problems of this sort are often caused by stray or extra characters
(commas, dashes, etc.) in the input files, which then can trigger
automatic conversion to character. Excel files are somewhat notorious for
this.

Bert,

Yes, I'm going to closely review the original data file and work forward
from there. Thanks for your comments; I do appreciate them.

Back when I have more information ... perhaps even a fix.

Best regards,

Rich