Text Format size not changing results -- why?

Question

Seems like this should be pretty straight forward, and I must have done this many times before with success.  Am I missing something obvious?
The text shows up, but it needs to display bigger than it is.  It's showing up consistently at about size 10, no matter what I set the size to, even "size = 100" ...
public function StimLetter(data:Object) {
               // format
               var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
               format.font = "Verdana";
               format.color = 0x000000;
               format.size = 100;
               // text
               stimText = new TextField();
               stimText.text = data.strng;
               stimText.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
               stimText.defaultTextFormat = format;
               addChild(stimText);
data.strng is simply a String coming from an array. 
Am I missing something here?! 

Answer 1

perhaps it's relevant to mention that the code above is the bulk of a "StimLetter" class that is importing into another class, and processed this way:
public var letterArray:Array = ["B", "C", "D", "F", "G", "H", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N","P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "X", "Z"];
// lots more code ...
var stimID:int;
var strng:String;
for (var si=0 ; si < letterArray.length; si++) {
     stimID = si + 1;
     strng = letterArray[si];
     this["stimLetter"+stimID] = new StimLetter({stimID: stimID, strng: strng});
     this["stimLetter"+stimID].x = displayCenter.x;
     this["stimLetter"+stimID].y = displayCenter.y;
     stimArray.push(this["stimLetter"+stimID]);
     container.addChild(stimArray[si]);