Well - you were right.
I changed it back to a single = and it still works.
So I can only guess.
The only other change I made was to add the internal pull-ups and switch the buttons to press pins to ground.
And I did that before changing the IF statement and it still didn't work until after I changed the IF statement.
I added two more buttons - one to manually increment hour and one to manually increment minute.
But in any case - its working - which is a good thing! :-]