Thanks, for the responses. Unfortunately, they didn't solve the problem, but they did point me in a useful direction.
That stray "+" sign was the result of my having gone back and forth between using all "+'s" and all "&'s" in the statement. It didn't make any difference. Whether or not Stack Labels was checked or unchecked didn't make any difference, either.
As I suspected, there were some settings I did not know about that over-ride anything I do in the expression. 1st, the Label Styles was set to Small Caps (I hadn't realized that was possible--I haven't had a lot of experience with cartography!) 2nd, the map does use the Maplex Labels, so now I have had to dig in to learn what all it does. I started playing with "Stack Labels"; I tried to force a split by inserting a stacking character into the expression, making the maximum number of characters per line too short for everything to fit on one line, and checking "force split"; but none of that was honored. Next I played with "Label Position"; the map came with it set to "Contour", so I went through the various options and found that I could make "Regular" do what I wanted to do, so that's what I'm using. I wish I knew why they used "Contour" when making the TelecomEditing map template; I hope my change doesn't come back to bite me further down the road.
It appears to me that "Contour" doesn't honor stacking; is this true, or am I doing something wrong. Also, is it true that you can't use vbScript code such as "vbNewLine" or "vbCrLf" when using the Maplex label engine?