Ok, more information…
The cable was plugged into the DHCP’d card.
The static IP card had no cable.
We must have a “rogue DHCP” server on the network which just happened to supply the DHCP card with the same IP address as what I assigned to the static IP!
Ok, I finally got the routes installed (thanks to all the help here 
).
First of all, my cable was plugged into the wrong card, one I had configured with DHCP, but not the one with the static IP. We must have a rouge DHCP server on the network and it somehow assigned the IP – OR, since it connects to a Cisco switch maybe the lease had just reassigned it to the MAC address (it’s always been plugged into the wrong card).
Then after that, I wrestled with Yast to put in a network route. The trick is to use a hypen “-” if there is no gateway.
The other thing I was doing wrong is using “route” to view my routes. I should have been using “route -n”. I suspect there may be more I can learn about routes but for now I think my system is configured the way I intended.
Nice you got it sorted out.