Thanks!
Fiddling with ‘the_excerpt’ get me moving in the right direction. But it still wasn’t quite right, so I dug a little deeper and found this in the Codex…
How to use Read More in Pages
Please remember that the “Read More” tag is used only on the Home page which shows the latest posts. It does not work in “Pages”. If you want to turn it on in Pages too for showing a set of partial posts, use the following code inside the loop for the dynamic content:
<?php
global $more;
$more = 0;
?>
//The code must be inserted ahead of the call to the content
<?php the_content('Continue Reading'); ?>
Yeah, I was running a page of blog posts from a single category, separate from my main blog page. Everything works now! Source of above is https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Customizing_the_Read_More