Many thanks to all who replied to me, especially Randy from Telamon, Randy
Smith, Jeff Kell, and Mark Klein.

From all of the answers I got, here is the deal:

In order to get #!/usr/local/bin/perl to work, you need to be on 5.5; however,
there is a work around for variable driven perl scripts. (vs. command line
argument driven perl scripts):

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
eval "exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0 $*"
  if $running_under_some_shell;

This should keep working even when the we do get the full functionality. (at
least that is what I've been told).

Thanks again, the fast turnaround from asking the question to sorting out
answers in my e-mail was amazing, .... as usual!

Kevin "a little less in the dark about perl" Newman