OK, I have been working on this a little since the earlier post and I just made my first breakthrough. I finally got a template file to be used instead of index.php. It was page-events.php. Using page.php doesn’t work. I don’t know why. If I change page-events.php to page.php it just reverts to using index.php. This doesn’t seem to follow the template hierarchy but I’m sure I’m missing something. Just wanted to update you on what I’m seeing.
Thanks