I found a few posts that steered me toward the ignition. I never really checked for a good spark, so picking up parts was a leap of faith. In one thread the owner had the same cold start issue, warm restart probs and the loss of acceleration when the gas pedal was pressed significantly. His solution was to check the connections to the ignitor.

Another post with similar problems had a suggestion from TxGreaseMonkey who suggested replacing the ignitor (ICM) and the coil. I picked up both of these from Rock Auto for under $100. They were Beck Arnley. Immediately after replacing those, the car, which would not start in cold weather, started up immediately. First problem solved. I took it for a test drive and it almost stalled !! Performance problem not solved. I found out after some more driving that the problem didn't seem to come back. I also no longer have the issue with the hesitation/chugging when I do more than feather the gas pedal. According to TxGreaseMonkey, the ignitor acts like a fuel pump cutoff, which would make sense that I was having not only a fire issue, but possibly also low fuel pressure.

The entire swap of those parts took under an hour. I only had to remove the distributor cap to get at those parts. The coil was attached with two 10mm bolts and had two low voltage wires attached. The ignitor was at the bottom of the distributor. It was attached with two screws that were attached to a metallic "bracket". That bracked had to be removed first and it was held in with two phillips/regular screws right below the ignitor. There are four low voltage wires on the ignitor.