by Gary Lebowitz.
Thanks for the tip. My problem was simply that I thought I should edit crontab directly the way I did with CentOS 6.5. Once I happened upon the message in an installation doc for Ubuntu 14.04 warning not to fiddle with crontab directly, but, rather, to type crontab -e at the command line and I saw a template pop up I did what I needed to to take out the direct modifications to the crontab that shouldn't be touched by human hands, saved carefully and retyped crontab -e at the command line to make crontab modifications. Everything working just fine now in the cron job dept. As they say RTFM.