Thanks everyone for the tips. After trying to put the filename in both single and double quotes and escaping the spaces with \, I still kept getting the same error -- even though these solutions worked when I manually logged into the FTP server...so, I turned to the source. After finding the source for the FTP.pm that was installed on my system I found this: 
sub get
{
...
 croak("Bad remote filename '$remote'\n")
    if $remote =~ /[\s\r\n]/s;

[download]
So, it looks like FTP->get was throwing out the filename before it ever requested it from the server. I checked on CPAN and sure enough, I had a really old libnet and Net::FTP installed. Newer versions do allow spaces in the filename. 
perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::libnet'

[download]
cured all my woes. Thanks again for the suggestions. --RT

In reply to (RhetTbull) Re: Spaces in file names with Net::FTP by RhetTbull
in thread Spaces in file names with Net::FTP by RhetTbull

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