Not sure what went wrong but in my C# Script I had the PlayerControls.cs accessing PlayerControls. It read at the top of the Script:
Assets> Scripts> PlayerControls.cs > PlayerControls.cs
The more I fiddled with it the worse things got to the point that Unity would only start in safe mode. A lot of head scratching and deleting of multiple scripts later, I finally started with a fresh PlayerControls script and wrote it again.
I am staying in the new InputSystem as trying to go back to the old is where everything went astray.
The new input system seems to be working as I am getting values of up to 1 and -1 on both my keyboard and XBox controller.
I may not know exactly what I am doing but I have been able to dig my way out of a few problems anyway.