failure and silence of SQL commands

Thank you both very much for your help; that was the problem.  Stupid of me (the answer came to me in the shower this morning as well).  If anyone out there in the developer community is listening, may I respectfully suggest that PSQL’s behavior --- to return nothing when Enter is hit – is pathological.  It would be so simple to return a message like ”Waiting for the end of the statement…” and it would save novices like me a lot of very unhappy hours. 

Cheers,

John