It's me again - the original poster.

I thought I'd exhausted all of Perl's built-in documentation in my quest, but that wasn't the case.

After I rethought my approach to the problem, MJD's oh-so-excellent perlreftut was exactly what I needed.

Thanks to Roy Johnson and Roger for making me realize I needed to rethink.

Here's an excerpt (I know, the code's pitiful. I'm still a newbie.) of what I wound up with:

#  populate the boss's part of the orgchart with employee numbers that
+ report to him/her
while (my ($loccode, $empnum, $bossnum, $name, $area) = $sth->fetchrow
+_array) {
    $boss{$empnum}    = $bossnum;
    $name{$empnum}    = $name;
    $area{$empnum}    = $area;
    $loccode{$empnum} = $loccode;
    push @{$chart{$bossnum}}, $empnum;
}

#  later, while working through the orgchart
sub printreports {
    my $number = shift(@_);
    my $indent = shift(@_)."  ";
    return unless defined @{$chart{$number}};
    print "$indent$loccode{$number}    $area{$number}:\n$indent*$name{
+$number} $number\n";
    my @reports = @{$chart{$number}};
    foreach my $peon (@reports) {
        next if $number == $peon;
        print "$indent$name{$peon}  $peon    $loccode{$number}\n";
        printreports($peon, $indent) if $depth eq "recursive";
    }
}
[download]

This produces an (admittedly, not the most pretty) indented org chart of sorts, with the name of each department listed as the respective department head is encountered.

Again, it ain't pretty, but it beats the snot out of the total lack of documentation we had before.

Oh, and Derby: You're right, you're too cynical. This wasn't homework, it was live data from a Kronos database on an iSeries 830. Maybe next time, you should expend effort on a question that you feel isn't homework.