>>I would recommend NOT using Custom Display tab<<
I agree that would not be the best place for the JS; using an HTML Form or Content Editor web part would be better (and an external JS file included in the page by a reference in my custom master page would be even better).
As for the rest, placing <script> tags in the body section with "immediate" execution JavaScript code worked just fine, so thanks for that.
Sure wish there was an option on this thing to tell it to just return the list values as XML so I could just do the styling with XSLT instead of having to write all this executable code just to format my output.
Thanks again.