Thanks, John! That last hint was the problem. I had been switching between printLine, where the line number being printed is needed, and print, which prints starting at the last cursor position, so "lcd.pnt(1," ") was the problem and why I was seeing a series of 1's displayed. I changed all my references to just lcd.print(" "), or similar, and the graphical S-meter is now displaying properly with the rest of my code.
Also, since I was getting warning messages about my code size approaching maximum limits, I commented out the touch-key sections to save room and eliminate that warning. That didn't "fix" anything, but was probably a good thing to do.
Fantastic to get such help for a newbie in this sketch language.
=Vic=
Vic WA4THR