Update:
I tried Oracle JDK with the same results. Thanks for the suggestion though!
I re-downloaded everything from scratch, this time using the latest suggested, which is now 1.12.2-14.23.1.2555. This combo works. I'm not sure if its an updated forge version or a bodged download of the other versions.
I just remembered, I had manually downloaded the 1.12.2 server file before I got forge. I wanted to check that a vanilla server was working before I went to get the forge stuff. Today, I let the forge installer download the minecraft server jar. Maybe they are different? I may have made the basic mistake of not letting the forge installer do ALL the work.
In any case I seem to up and operating. Thanks for all the help!