I'm Back...I guess I hardly left. I am installing another Mint version 19.3 Cinnamon. All was flowing nicely till I came home and attempted to connect to dialup. I installed wvdial and I believe it is properly configured. GNOME PPP is installed and I configured that, but it cannot detect the modem. I get info of a usr/share/alsa/pcm/modem.conf being talked about, but putting that in responds with no such file or directory. I've been reading man & help and can't figure out a direction. This is my last chore currently before I learn how to back things up. The usb external modem is a Zoom brand 56K coaxtent and the driver has been installed. I tried entering /ttyACMO in the location window of GNOME PPP as well as trying all the offered locations from the dropdown list. Message is 'no modem detected on system. I'm using the modem on the Windows machine now.
As always my thanks for an assist.