Okay. I now have just the most recent post of a specific category appearing at the top of the center section of my static homepage.

http://www.shepherdjim.com
Please be kind -- the Shepherd Jim w/site is my sandbox where I'm testing stuff.

Now, how do I format the elements of THAT post's <div class="post-bodycopy clearfix">, div class="post-headline">, etc. without changing the appearance of all the other posts on single, multiple, search, etc post pages? I know I should be simply targeting in CSS but I'm not clever enough.

You can change in index.php, towards the bottom:

PHP Code:

<body<?php echo

to

PHP Code:

<body<?php 
if ( is_page() ) { 
    $current_page_id = $wp_query->get_queried_object_id(); 
    echo ' class="page page-' . $current_page_id . '"'; 
} ?><?php echo

Then add a CSS Insert:

body.page-XX div.post-bodycopy {
.....
}
body.page-XX div.post-headline {
.....
}

Replace XX with the ID of the page containing the posts to be styled

With the above example you could also group-style all pages due to 2 classes (page and page-XX) being added, i.e. with a CSS Insert

 body.page div.post-headline {
...
}

I am adding CSS classes to "body" in the next Atahualpa version.