I got it to work by specifying a text field instead of a char field. That's strange that one works and not the other. That's a bummer that I couldn't get the char field to work and I hate it that I don't know what's the difference between a text and char in mySQL.

But, in any case! It works! Here's the code i used to create a simple table:

create table table1 (iid int not null primary key, clastname text, cfirstname text);

Thanks for your help.