Ok, I have something that works, but it's not pretty.
I ended up ditching the .left and .right class divs and replaced it with a .background div that included a repeating background the width of the content div. The drawback here is that I have to use this graphic as my background color otherwise I have the same issue with my div background color as I did with the .left and .right.
It's not pretty, but it works for the time being. I appreciate any help anyone can continue to offer though to continue down the path that Wickham had started to lead me down, as I know it's the cleanest way.
I still haven't figured out why the text at the bottom is still hidden behind the footer, and can't get any margin or padding statement to fix it. I can use a
at the bottom of the page to manually scroll it up. It's not right, but it works.
See where it's at here:
http://www.bourdeaux.net/temp/csstest2.htm