Okay, confession time. I was working with a deadline to get this done, so I uninstalled Wordpress and did a work around to achieve members-only pages.
But I reinstalled this morning and tried to reproduce the problem. And I get a different problem.
I added three pages - Welcome, About, Contact - and deleted the Sample page, in that order.
In Reading I switched to Static and selected Welcome.
The main navigation menu contains Home, Welcome, About, Contact. A click on Home gives me the postings page. A click on Welcome also gives me the Welcome page.
The text of the Welcome page says "Welcome to the members only site." I went into Edit the page from the dashboard. When I "Preview Changes" I get a very quick "redirect" to the post listings page, with no sign of the Welcome page.
Having said all that, I noticed on this Wordpress installation that there was an option "Enable Multisite Wordpress" which I left unchecked. Is the problem that I should have said "yes" to enable a Wordpress site within a Wordpress site?
Thanks....Duane