The excellent link to www.thexlab.com explained that the trash was in the hidden directory .Trash in the user's home directory.
I went into a terminal window, created a new trash directory named .Trash2 and made sure the permissions and ownership matched .Trash. Then I renamed the directories with the "mv" command so that .Trash became trash-old and .Trash2 became .Trash. That gave me a nice, empty trash wastbasket that worked normally.
Later I deleted the files in the trash-old directory using commands in a terminal windows. It turned out that deleting one of the directories in trash-old hung the terminal window, but I used a second window and saw that the killer directory was gone.
I guess there was something wrong with that directory.
Thanks.
bd