I just resolved the issue (fresh coffee == good) ! In my schema, I had added:
<field name="text" type="text" indexed="true" stored="false" multivalued="true" /> but missed the copyField definition. Adding these: <copyField source="text" dest="a_spell"/> <copyField source="text" dest="a_spellPhrase"/> and a restart and everything is working properly. Thanks for the reply and for LucidImagination -- the only reason I have been able to get Solr integrated into our ruby app. -Mike