Thank you - ptoulis (Sexton) from Nov 24, 2008 at 08:28 UTC - for your quick reply to my inquiry and your most helpful suggestions.

I recall now, I have previously read about sorting dates in century/mm/dd order instead of the traditional American date structure of dd/mm/yy.

However, if you will please note: After I parse the 'incoming' date structure into its' individual components - I do not deal with either format - in any manner - in the program. You will further note that in the line:
if (($ampm eq "a") && ($hour <= 9)) {$hour = '0'.int($hour) ; }
that I prepend a zero to the single digit hour to assist in sorting.

Could you, please, expand on your comment: "You should reconsider also, the way you build up the hash: the => seems irrelevant in the outer hash."
I have tried to mimic the example from the manpage: "perldsc", which shows:

 %HoH = (
        flintstones => {
        lead      => "fred",
        pal       => "barney",
        },
        jetsons     => {
        lead      => "george",
        wife      => "jane",
        "his boy" => "elroy",
        },
        simpsons    => {
        lead      => "homer",
        wife      => "marge",
        kid       => "bart",
    },
 );
[download]

What am I missing (doing wrong)?
Again, thank you for your assistance, sometimes it's a chore trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
Thomas