Thank you for your willingness to help me.
I have taken my problem out of its massive context and created a demonstration table illustrating it on a small, easy-to-read scale.
The goal is to produce a recordset yielding information about the earliest shipment to this customer. Here's a graphic that I hope says it all:
I deliberated on whether to include this last part, but if you're wondering, the reason I must have it in one record is because I intend to take this table and join it to another query involving the Orders table using the Customer_ID key. If you're following that in your mind's eye, you can see the problem... I'll accidentally generate 2 duplicate line items for every order.
Besides, it kinda irks me that I know how to use Min/Max etc. aggregate functions to discover a single sought after record, but I don't know to read any other fields containing pertinent information about that record because inclulding them in the SQL statement creates more records, thus defeating the purpose!
Where am I going wrong?