As I incremented up, I got all the way to 1.12.1 & all worked as expected. That made me think that the DB was not initialized, but when I blew away the statefulset for postgres & re-deployed for versions 1.1.0-1.12.1, I could not replicate the problem. This makes me think that problem is somehow related to the data volume (local blockstore)....maybe not initialized in a timely manner. If this problem arises again, I will create an issue, but as it is working now, I will leave well enough alone.