I haven't tested it yet, but my intuition is crackling.
Anyway, I'm not getting a functioning TOC in the LRF because in the original Word doc where I built the TOC that was in the LIT file I did not use page numbers. So, even though the LIT file works, Calibre did not have what it needed to create a functioning TOC.
I'm sure this is the problem because this is the difference between the ebooks that came out of Calibre with functioning TOCs and those that didn't.
MY bad.